Machine Translation Impact in E-commerce Multilingual Search
This work addresses optimization of translation resources for e-commerce platforms, but it is incremental as it builds on known correlations between MT quality and retrieval performance.
The study investigated how improving machine translation quality affects multilingual search performance in e-commerce, finding that retrieval gains plateau beyond a certain translation quality threshold and identifying key language pairs for targeted investment.
Previous work suggests that performance of cross-lingual information retrieval correlates highly with the quality of Machine Translation. However, there may be a threshold beyond which improving query translation quality yields little or no benefit to further improve the retrieval performance. This threshold may depend upon multiple factors including the source and target languages, the existing MT system quality and the search pipeline. In order to identify the benefit of improving an MT system for a given search pipeline, we investigate the sensitivity of retrieval quality to the presence of different levels of MT quality using experimental datasets collected from actual traffic. We systematically improve the performance of our MT systems quality on language pairs as measured by MT evaluation metrics including Bleu and Chrf to determine their impact on search precision metrics and extract signals that help to guide the improvement strategies. Using this information we develop techniques to compare query translations for multiple language pairs and identify the most promising language pairs to invest and improve.