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I tried this on a fragment of https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 's Artikel des Tages (article of the day) box for today (February 7,

I tried this on a fragment of https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 's Artikel des Tages (article of the day) box for today (February 7, 2021). Input: "Das Frauenstimmrecht in der Schweiz (Stimm- und Wahlrecht) wurde durch eine eidgenössische Volksabstimmung am 7. Februar 1971 eingeführt. Formell wurde das Frauenstimmrecht am 16. März 1971 wirksam." Result: "Women's right to vote in Switzerland (voice and election rights) was governed by a federal referendum on 7 October. In the case of the United Kingdom, the Commission has not been able to take the necessary measures to ensure that the aid is granted. In the case of women's rights, the March 1971." The translation of the first sentence conveys the meaning but changes the date from February 7 to October 7 and drops the year. The next part triggers... something in the translation engine, in any case the original has nothing to do with the UK or the (EU) Commission. I suspect this is due to German date notation, where "7th" is written "7.", and the period confuses the translator, making it think a sentence ends there. Without periods: Input: "Das Frauenstimmrecht in der Schweiz (Stimm- und Wahlrecht) wurde durch eine eidgenössische Volksabstimmung am 7 Februar 1971 eingeführt. Formell wurde das Frauenstimmrecht am 16 März 1971 wirksam." Result: "Women's right to vote in Switzerland (voice and election rights) was introduced by a federal referendum on 7 February 1971. In addition, the Council adopted a resolution on the establishment of a European Community strategy for the development of the European Union." The first sentence is fine now. The second is nonsense, the original sentence refers to Switzerland and means "Women's right to vote formally came into force on March 16, 1971". Still nothing to do with the EU. This broken translation remains the same when looking at just this sentence in isolation. So: Thanks for this, I'm very happy to see this project. But it needs some more work to iron out the kinks. Good luck!

ascorbic 6y ago
Was the model trained on a corpus of EU documents? I'd imagine that's a great source of multilingual training data, but could lead to an obsession with the EU in the translations
- pjfin123 6y ago
  It was partially trained on EU and UN documents. Interesting observation, less emphasis on parliamentary/legal data vs a data set like OpenSubtitles, which has more casual language use, might give a better performance.
  - tom_mellior 6y ago
    The sentence in question could easily be found in a legal document, it's not really casual language. The word "Formell" seems to trigger the EU focus, maybe it's very characteristic for established norms within the EU's translation service. Changing it to the closely related "Formal" makes the translation work: "The law on women's voting became effective on 16 March 1971." Another option would be "Offiziell", which gives the so-so: "Women's rights were officially enforced on 16 March 1971."
pjfin123 6y ago
Interesting, thanks for the detailed write up. > The translation of the first sentence conveys the meaning but changes the date from February 7 to October 7 and drops the year. Like discussed earlier in this thread Argos Translate tokenizes the incoming text into what are essentially words and then passes them to the Transformer network. For situations where the risks of translations that are fluid and seem reasonable but are totally wrong is high neural translation might not make sense even though the quality is generally higher. Instead you would probably want to use rule-based translations like what the Apertium project does.

ascorbic 6y ago

Was the model trained on a corpus of EU documents? I'd imagine that's a great source of multilingual training data, but could lead to an obsession with the EU in the translations

pjfin123 6y ago
It was partially trained on EU and UN documents. Interesting observation, less emphasis on parliamentary/legal data vs a data set like OpenSubtitles, which has more casual language use, might give a better performance.
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  The sentence in question could easily be found in a legal document, it's not really casual language. The word "Formell" seems to trigger the EU focus, maybe it's very characteristic for established norms within the EU's translation service. Changing it to the closely related "Formal" makes the translation work: "The law on women's voting became effective on 16 March 1971." Another option would be "Offiziell", which gives the so-so: "Women's rights were officially enforced on 16 March 1971."

pjfin123 6y ago

Interesting, thanks for the detailed write up. > The translation of the first sentence conveys the meaning but changes the date from February 7 to October 7 and drops the year. Like discussed earlier in this thread Argos Translate tokenizes the incoming text into what are essentially words and then passes them to the Transformer network. For situations where the risks of translations that are fluid and seem reasonable but are totally wrong is high neural translation might not make sense even though the quality is generally higher. Instead you would probably want to use rule-based translations like what the Apertium project does.