# Pronoun Translation in English-French Machine Translation: An Analysis of Error Types

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.10196 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10196/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Aug 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Mention Attention for Pronoun Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14829/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pronouns are a long-standing challenge in machine translation. We present a study of the performance of a range of rule-based, statistical and neural MT systems on pronoun translation based on an extensive manual evaluation using the PROTEST test suite, which enables a fine-grained analysis of different pronoun types and sheds light on the difficulties of the task. We find that the rule-based approaches in our corpus perform poorly as a result of oversimplification, whereas SMT and early NMT systems exhibit significant shortcomings due to a lack of awareness of the functional and referential properties of pronouns. A recent Transformer-based NMT system with cross-sentence context shows very promising results on non-anaphoric pronouns and intra-sentential anaphora, but there is still considerable room for improvement in examples with cross-sentence dependencies.