M3T: A New Benchmark Dataset for Multi-Modal Document-Level Machine Translation
This addresses the problem of inaccurate translation in real-world documents like PDFs for machine translation researchers, though it is incremental as it focuses on dataset creation rather than a new method.
The paper tackles the challenge of translating semi-structured documents with complex layouts by introducing M3T, a new benchmark dataset for evaluating multi-modal document-level machine translation systems.
Document translation poses a challenge for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems. Most document-level NMT systems rely on meticulously curated sentence-level parallel data, assuming flawless extraction of text from documents along with their precise reading order. These systems also tend to disregard additional visual cues such as the document layout, deeming it irrelevant. However, real-world documents often possess intricate text layouts that defy these assumptions. Extracting information from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or heuristic rules can result in errors, and the layout (e.g., paragraphs, headers) may convey relationships between distant sections of text. This complexity is particularly evident in widely used PDF documents, which represent information visually. This paper addresses this gap by introducing M3T, a novel benchmark dataset tailored to evaluate NMT systems on the comprehensive task of translating semi-structured documents. This dataset aims to bridge the evaluation gap in document-level NMT systems, acknowledging the challenges posed by rich text layouts in real-world applications.