On the evaluation of semantic phenomena in neural machine translation using natural language inference

Adam Poliak, Yonatan Belinkov, James Glass, Benjamin Van Durme

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

We propose a process for investigating the extent to which sentence representations arising from neural machine translation (NMT) systems encode distinct semantic phenomena.We use these representations as features to train a natural language inference (NLI) classifier based on datasets recast from existing semantic annotations. In applying this process to a representative NMT system, we find its encoder appears most suited to supporting inferences at the syntax-semantics interface, as compared to anaphora resolution requiring worldknowledge. We conclude with a discussion on the merits and potential deficiencies of the existing process, and how it may be improved and extended as a broader framework for evaluating semantic coverage.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationShort Papers
Pages513-523
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781948087292
StatePublished - 2018
Externally publishedYes
Event2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL HLT 2018 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: 1 Jun 20186 Jun 2018

Publication series

NameNAACL HLT 2018 - 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies - Proceedings of the Conference
Volume2

Conference

Conference2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL HLT 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period1/06/186/06/18

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Computer Science Applications

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