Recent Advances in Dialogue Machine Translation

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in dialogue translation, which is a significant application task for machine translation (MT) technology. However, this has so far not been extensively explored due to its inherent characteristics including data limitation, discourse properties and personality traits. In this article, we give the first comprehensive review of dialogue MT, including well-defined problems (e.g., 4 perspectives), collected resources (e.g., 5 language pairs and 4 sub-domains), representative approaches (e.g., architecture, discourse phenomena and personality) and useful applications (e.g., hotel-booking chat system). After systematical investigation, we also build a state-of-the-art dialogue NMT system by leveraging a breadth of established approaches such as novel architectures, popular pre-training and advanced techniques. Encouragingly, we push the state-of-the-art performance up to 62.7 BLEU points on a commonly-used benchmark by using mBART pre-training. We hope that this survey paper could significantly promote the research in dialogue MT.

Keywords

• dialogue
• neural machine translation
• discourse issue
• benchmark data
• existing approaches
• real-life applications