Towards formality-aware neural machine translation by leveraging context information

Abstract

Formality is one of the most important linguistic properties to determine the naturalness of translation. Although a target-side context contains formality-related tokens, the sparsity within the context makes it difficult for context-aware neural machine translation (NMT) models to properly discern them. In this paper, we introduce a novel training method to explicitly inform the NMT model by pinpointing key informative tokens using a formality classifier. Given a target context, the formality classifier guides the model to concentrate on the formality-related tokens within the context. Additionally, we modify the standard cross-entropy loss, especially toward the formality-related tokens obtained from the classifier. Experimental results show that our approaches not only improve overall translation quality but also reflect the appropriate formality from the target context.