Test Suite Evaluation: Morphological Challenges and Pronoun Translation

Marion Weller-Di Marco and Alexander Fraser

2022 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

This paper summarizes the results of our test suite evaluation with a
main focus on morphology for the language pairs English to/from
German. We look at the translation of morphologically complex words
(DE–EN), and evaluate whether English noun phrases are translated as
compounds vs. phrases into German. Furthermore, we investigate the
preservation of morphological features (gender in EN–DE pronoun
translation and number in morpho-syntactically complex structures for
DE–EN). Our results indicate that systems are able to interpret
linguistic structures to obtain relevant information, but also that
translation becomes more challenging with increasing complexity, as
seen, for example, when translating words with negation or
non-concatenative properties, and for the more complex cases of the
pronoun translation task.