Detecting Critical Errors Considering Cross-Cultural Factors in English-Korean Translation

Sugyeong Eo, Jungwoo Lim, Chanjun Park, Dahyun Jung, Seonmin Koo, Hyeonseok Moon, Jaehyung Seo, Heuiseok Lim

Abstract: Recent machine translation (MT) systems have overcome language barriers for a wide range of users, yet they still carry the risk of critical meaning deviation. Critical error detection (CED) is a task that identifies an inherent risk of catastrophic meaning distortions in the machine translation output. With the importance of reflecting cultural elements in detecting critical errors, we introduce the culture-aware “Politeness” type in detecting English-Korean critical translation errors. Besides, we facilitate two tasks by providing multiclass labels: critical error detection and critical error type classification (CETC). Empirical evaluations reveal that our introduced data augmentation approach using a newly presented perturber significantly outperforms existing baselines in both tasks. Further analysis highlights the significance of multiclass labeling by demonstrating its superior effectiveness compared to binary labels.