A review of the state-of-the-art in automatic post-editing

Félix do Carmo; Dimitar Shterionov; Joss Moorkens; Joachim Wagner; Murhaf Hossari; Eric Paquin; Dag Schmidtke; Declan Groves; Andy Way

doi:10.1007/s10590-020-09252-y

A review of the state-of-the-art in automatic post-editing

Mach Transl. 2021;35(2):101-143. doi: 10.1007/s10590-020-09252-y. Epub 2020 Dec 24.

Authors

Félix do Carmo^{1

2}, Dimitar Shterionov^{3

2}, Joss Moorkens^{4

5}, Joachim Wagner⁵, Murhaf Hossari⁵, Eric Paquin⁵, Dag Schmidtke⁶, Declan Groves⁶, Andy Way⁵

Affiliations

¹ Centre for Translation Studies, University of Surrey, Surrey, UK.
² ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland.
³ Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
⁴ School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland.
⁵ ADAPT Centre, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland.
⁶ Microsoft, South County Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin, Ireland.

Abstract

This article presents a review of the evolution of automatic post-editing, a term that describes methods to improve the output of machine translation systems, based on knowledge extracted from datasets that include post-edited content. The article describes the specificity of automatic post-editing in comparison with other tasks in machine translation, and it discusses how it may function as a complement to them. Particular detail is given in the article to the five-year period that covers the shared tasks presented in WMT conferences (2015-2019). In this period, discussion of automatic post-editing evolved from the definition of its main parameters to an announced demise, associated with the difficulties in improving output obtained by neural methods, which was then followed by renewed interest. The article debates the role and relevance of automatic post-editing, both as an academic endeavour and as a useful application in commercial workflows.

Keywords: Automatic Post-editing; Neural Post-editing; Neural machine translation; State-of-the-art in Automatic Post-editing.