The lack of targeted and automatic methods for quantifying these errors limits current research on translating idiomatic expressions. 


Obstacles for idiomatic expressions in NMT 


Global Metrics (e.g. BLEU) consider the full translation and obscure the effects of idiom translation


Global metrics for NMT of idiomatic expression 


Targeted evaluation isolates the idiom translation with word alignments or word edit distance, which measures idiom translation accuracy but doesn’t account for literal translation errors. Shao et al. (2018) proposed a method for estimating these errors’ frequency but it requires hand-crafted blocklists with words corresponding to literal translation errors. 


Targeted Evaluation for NMT of idiomatic expression 


Related work in Idioms in NMT and Targeted Evaluation. 


Related Work


The translation of idiomatic expressions such as “under the weather” is a current problem in Neural Machine Translation. NMT models incorrectly translate idiomatic expressions’ meanings literally or word-by-word. 

University of California, Berkeley

Neural Machine Translation has a difficult time translating non-compositional phrases (e.g. idioms) because their meaning is figurative and cannot be derived from the meaning of the words that compose them. 


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