Building User-oriented Personalized Machine Translator based on User-Generated Textual Content

Peng Zhang, Zhengqing Guan, Baoxi Liu, Sharon Xianghua Ding, Tun Lu, Hansu Gu, Ning Gu

Abstract: Machine Translation (MT) has been a very useful tool to assist multilingual communication and collaboration. In recent years, by taking advantage of the exciting developments of neural networks and deep learning, the accuracy and speed of machine translation have been continuously improved. However, most machine translation methods and systems are data-driven. They tend to select a consensus response represented in training data, while a user's preferred linguistic style, which is important for translation comprehension and user experience, is ignored. For this problem, we aim to build a user-oriented personalized machine translation model in this paper. The model aims to learn each user's linguistic style from the textual content that is generated by her/him (User-Generated Textual Content, UGTC) in social media context and generate personalized translation results utilizing several state-of-the-art deep learning techniques like Transformer and pre-training. We also implemented a user-oriented personalized machine translator using Weibo as a case of the source of UGTC to provide a systematical implementation scheme of a user-oriented personalized machine translation system based on our model. The translator was evaluated by automatic evaluation in combination with human evaluation. The results suggest that our model can generate more personalized, natural and lively translation results and enhance the comprehensibility of translation results, which makes its generations more preferred by users versus general translation results.