Lexical diversity in statistical and neural machine translation

Brglez, Mojca (author), Vintar, Špela (author)

Neural machine translation systems have revolutionized translation processes in terms of quantity and speed in recent years, and they have even been claimed to achieve human parity. However, the quality of their output has also raised serious doubts and concerns, such as loss in lexical variation, evidence of “machine translationese”, and its effect on post-editing, which results in “post-editese”. In this study, we analyze the outputs of three English to Slovenian machine translation systems in terms of lexical diversity in three different genres. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, we analyze one statistical and two neural systems, and we compare them to a human reference translation. Our quantitative analyses based on lexical diversity metrics show diverging results; however, translation systems, particularly neural ones, mostly exhibit larger lexical diversity than their human counterparts. Nevertheless, a qualitative method shows that these quantitative results are not always a reliable tool to assess true lexical diversity and that a lot of lexical “creativity”, especially by neural translation systems, is often unreliable, inconsistent, and misguided.

• Language: English
• Keywords: machine translation, neural translation systems, lexical diversity, type-token ratio, measure of textual lexical diversity
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2022
• Number of pages: 14 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 13, iss. 2, art. 93
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-137294
• UDC: 81\'25\'322.4
• ISSN on article: 2078-2489
• DOI: 10.3390/info13020093
• COBISS.SI-ID: 100548099
• Publication date in RUL: 09.06.2022

BRGLEZ, Mojca and VINTAR, Špela, 2022, Lexical diversity in statistical and neural machine translation. Information [online]. 2022. Vol. 13, no. 2,  93. [Accessed 30 March 2025]. DOI 10.3390/info13020093. Retrieved from: https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/IzpisGradiva.php?lang=eng&id=137294

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Information
• Shortened title: Information
• Publisher: MDPI
• ISSN: 2078-2489
• COBISS.SI-ID: 18497046

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.
• Licensing start date: 15.02.2022

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: strojno prevajanje, nevronski prevajalniki, leksikalna diverziteta, razmerje različnic in pojavnic, merjenje besedilne leksikalne diverzitete

Projects

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Project number: P6-0215
• Name: Slovenski jezik - bazične, kontrastivne in aplikativne raziskave