Google Translate Error Analysis for Mental Healthcare Information: Evaluating Accuracy, Comprehensibility, and Implications for Multilingual Healthcare Communication

This study explores the use of Google Translate (GT) for translating mental healthcare (MHealth) information and evaluates its accuracy, comprehensibility, and implications for multilingual healthcare communication through analysing GT output in the MHealth domain from English to Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Romanian, and Spanish. Two datasets comprising MHealth information from the UK National Health Service website and information leaflets from The Royal College of Psychiatrists were used. Native speakers of the target languages manually assessed the GT translations, focusing on medical terminology accuracy, comprehensibility, and critical syntactic/semantic errors. GT output analysis revealed challenges in accurately translating medical terminology, particularly in Arabic, Romanian, and Persian. Fluency issues were prevalent across various languages, affecting comprehension, mainly in Arabic and Spanish. Critical errors arose in specific contexts, such as bullet-point formatting, specifically in Persian, Turkish, and Romanian. Although improvements are seen in longer-text translations, there remains a need to enhance accuracy in medical and mental health terminology and fluency, whilst also addressing formatting issues for a more seamless user experience. The findings highlight the need to use customised translation engines for Mhealth translation and the challenges when relying solely on machine-translated medical content, emphasising the crucial role of human reviewers in multilingual healthcare communication.

SurreyAI 2023 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task

Quality Estimation (QE) systems are important in situations where it is necessary to assess the quality of translations, but there is no reference available. This paper describes the approach adopted by the SurreyAI team for addressing the Sentence-Level Direct Assessment shared task in WMT23. The proposed approach builds upon the TransQuest framework, exploring various autoencoder pre-trained language models within the MonoTransQuest architecture using single and ensemble settings. The autoencoder pre-trained language models employed in the proposed systems are XLMV, InfoXLM-large, and XLMR-large. The evaluation utilizes Spearman and Pearson correlation coefficients, assessing the relationship between machine-predicted quality scores and human judgments for 5 language pairs (English-Gujarati, English-Hindi, English-Marathi, English-Tamil and English-Telugu). The MonoTQ-InfoXLM-large approach emerges as a robust strategy, surpassing all other individual models proposed in this study by significantly improving over the baseline for the majority of the language pairs.

Evaluation of Chinese-English Machine Translation of Emotion-Loaded Microblog Texts: A Human Annotated Dataset for the Quality Assessment of Emotion Translation

In this paper, we focus on how current Machine Translation (MT) tools perform on the translation of emotion-loaded texts by evaluating outputs from Google Translate according to a framework proposed in this paper. We propose this evaluation framework based on the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and perform a detailed error analysis of the MT outputs. From our analysis, we observe that about 50% of the MT outputs fail to preserve the original emotion. After further analysis of the errors, we find that emotion carrying words and linguistic phenomena such as polysemous words, negation, abbreviation etc., are common causes for these translation errors.

Biographical: A Semi-Supervised Relation Extraction Dataset

Extracting biographical information from online documents is a popular research topic among the information extraction (IE) community. Various natural language processing (NLP) techniques such as text classification, text summarisation and relation extraction are commonly used to achieve this. Among these techniques, RE is the most common since it can be directly used to build biographical knowledge graphs. RE is usually framed as a supervised machine learning (ML) problem, where ML models are trained on annotated datasets. However, there are few annotated datasets for RE since the annotation process can be costly and time-consuming. To address this, we developed Biographical, the first semi-supervised dataset for RE. The dataset, which is aimed towards digital humanities (DH) and historical research, is automatically compiled by aligning sentences from Wikipedia articles with matching structured data from sources including Pantheon and Wikidata. By exploiting the structure of Wikipedia articles and robust named entity recognition (NER), we match information with relatively high precision in order to compile annotated relation pairs for ten different relations that are important in the DH domain. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the dataset by training a state-of-the-art neural model to classify relation pairs, and evaluate it on a manually annotated gold standard set. Biographical is primarily aimed at training neural models for RE within the domain of digital humanities and history, but as we discuss at the end of this paper, it can be useful for other purposes as well.

Sentiment-Aware Measure (SAM) for Evaluating Sentiment Transfer by Machine Translation Systems

In translating text where sentiment is the main message, human translators give particular attention to sentiment-carrying words. The reason is that an incorrect translation of such words would miss the fundamental aspect of the source text, i.e. the author's sentiment. In the online world, MT systems are extensively used to translate User-Generated Content (UGC) such as reviews, tweets, and social media posts, where the main message is often the author's positive or negative attitude towards the topic of the text. It is important in such scenarios to accurately measure how far an MT system can be a reliable real-life utility in transferring the correct affect message. This paper tackles an under-recognised problem in the field of machine translation evaluation which is judging to what extent automatic metrics concur with the gold standard of human evaluation for a correct translation of sentiment. We evaluate the efficacy of conventional quality metrics in spotting a mistranslation of sentiment, especially when it is the sole error in the MT output. We propose a numerical `sentiment-closeness' measure appropriate for assessing the accuracy of a translated affect message in UGC text by an MT system. We will show that incorporating this sentiment-aware measure can significantly enhance the correlation of some available quality metrics with the human judgement of an accurate translation of sentiment.

BLEU, METEOR, BERTScore: Evaluation of Metrics Performance in Assessing Critical Translation Errors in Sentiment-oriented Text

Social media companies as well as authorities make extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to monitor postings of hate speech, celebrations of violence or profanity. Since AI software requires massive volumes of data to train computers, Machine Translation (MT) of the online content is commonly used to process posts written in several languages and hence augment the data needed for training. However, MT mistakes are a regular occurrence when translating sentiment-oriented user-generated content (UGC), especially when a low-resource language is involved. The adequacy of the whole process relies on the assumption that the evaluation metrics used give a reliable indication of the quality of the translation. In this paper, we assess the ability of automatic quality metrics to detect critical machine translation errors which can cause serious misunderstanding of the affect message. We compare the performance of three canonical metrics on meaningless translations where the semantic content is seriously impaired as compared to meaningful translations with a critical error which exclusively distorts the sentiment of the source text. We conclude that there is a need for fine-tuning of automatic metrics to make them more robust in detecting sentiment critical errors.

Challenges in Translation of Emotions in Multilingual User-Generated Content: Twitter as a Case Study

Although emotions are universal concepts, transferring the different shades of emotion from one language to another may not always be straightforward for human translators, let alone for machine translation systems. Moreover, the cognitive states are established by verbal explanations of experience which is shaped by both the verbal and cultural contexts. There are a number of verbal contexts where expression of emotions constitutes the pivotal component of the message. This is particularly true for User-Generated Content (UGC) which can be in the form of a review of a product or a service, a tweet, or a social media post. Recently, it has become common practice for multilingual websites such as Twitter to provide an automatic translation of UGC to reach out to their linguistically diverse users. In such scenarios, the process of translating the user's emotion is entirely automatic with no human intervention, neither for post-editing nor for accuracy checking. In this research, we assess whether automatic translation tools can be a successful real-life utility in transferring emotion in user-generated multilingual data such as tweets. We show that there are linguistic phenomena specific of Twitter data that pose a challenge in translation of emotions in different languages. We summarise these challenges in a list of linguistic features and show how frequent these features are in different language pairs. We also assess the capacity of commonly used methods for evaluating the performance of an MT system with respect to the preservation of emotion in the source text.

An Exploratory Analysis of Multilingual Word-Level Quality Estimation with Cross-Lingual Transformers

Most studies on word-level Quality Estimation (QE) of machine translation focus on language-specific models. The obvious disadvantages of these approaches are the need for labelled data for each language pair and the high cost required to maintain several language-specific models. To overcome these problems, we explore different approaches to multilingual, word-level QE. We show that these QE models perform on par with the current language-specific models. In the cases of zero-shot and few-shot QE, we demonstrate that it is possible to accurately predict word-level quality for any given new language pair from models trained on other language pairs. Our findings suggest that the word-level QE models based on powerful pre-trained transformers that we propose in this paper generalise well across languages, making them more useful in real-world scenarios.

TransQuest: Translation Quality Estimation with Cross-lingual Transformers

Recent years have seen big advances in the field of sentence-level quality estimation (QE), largely as a result of using neural-based architectures. However, the majority of these methods work only on the language pair they are trained on and need retraining for new language pairs. This process can prove difficult from a technical point of view and is usually computationally expensive. In this paper we propose a simple QE framework based on cross-lingual transformers, and we use it to implement and evaluate two different neural architectures. Our evaluation shows that the proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art results outperforming current open-source quality estimation frameworks when trained on datasets from WMT. In addition, the framework proves very useful in transfer learning settings, especially when dealing with low-resourced languages, allowing us to obtain very competitive results.

Fake or Real? A Study of Arabic Satirical Fake News

One very common type of fake news is satire which comes in a form of a news website or an online platform that parodies reputable real news agencies to create a sarcastic version of reality. This type of fake news is often disseminated by individuals on their online platforms as it has a much stronger effect in delivering criticism than through a straightforward message. However, when the satirical text is disseminated via social media without mention of its source, it can be mistaken for real news. This study conducts several exploratory analyses to identify the linguistic properties of Arabic fake news with satirical content. We exploit these features to build a number of machine learning models capable of identifying satirical fake news with an accuracy of up to 98.6%.