The Source-Target Domain Mismatch Problem in Machine Translation

Understand

While we live in an increasingly interconnected world, different places still exhibit strikingly different cultures and many events we experience in our every day life pertain only to the specific place we live in.

• As a result, people often talk about different things in different parts of the world.
• In this work we study the effect of local context in machine translation and postulate that particularly in low resource settings this causes the domains of the source and target language to greatly mismatch, as the two languages are often spoken in further apart regions of the world with more distinctive cultural traits and unrelated local events.
• We first formalize the concept of source-target domain mismatch, propose a metric to quantify it, and provide empirical evidence corroborating our intuition that organic text produced by people speaking very different languages exhibits the most dramatic differences.