# Sentiment-based Candidate Selection for NMT

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.04840 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04840/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01401/) (2020)
- [Marian: Fast Neural Machine Translation in C++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00344/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11041/) (2017)
- [MTNT: A Testbed for Machine Translation of Noisy Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00388/) (2018)
- [Examining the Tip of the Iceberg: A Data Set for Idiom Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04681/) (2018)
- [Multilingual Sentiment Analysis: An RNN-Based Framework for Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04511/) (2018)
- [Classifying Idiomatic and Literal Expressions Using Topic Models and Intensity of Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09961/) (2018)
- [User Reviews and Language: How Language Influences Ratings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.01919/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The explosion of user-generated content (UGC)--e.g. social media posts, comments, and reviews--has motivated the development of NLP applications tailored to these types of informal texts. Prevalent among these applications have been sentiment analysis and machine translation (MT). Grounded in the observation that UGC features highly idiomatic, sentiment-charged language, we propose a decoder-side approach that incorporates automatic sentiment scoring into the MT candidate selection process. We train separate English and Spanish sentiment classifiers, then, using n-best candidates generated by a baseline MT model with beam search, select the candidate that minimizes the absolute difference between the sentiment score of the source sentence and that of the translation, and perform a human evaluation to assess the produced translations. Unlike previous work, we select this minimally divergent translation by considering the sentiment scores of the source sentence and translation on a continuous interval, rather than using e.g. binary classification, allowing for more fine-grained selection of translation candidates. The results of human evaluations show that, in comparison to the open-source MT baseline model on top of which our sentiment-based pipeline is built, our pipeline produces more accurate translations of colloquial, sentiment-heavy source texts.