Evaluating and Improving the Coreference Capabilities of Machine Translation Models

Machine translation (MT) requires a wide range of linguistic capabilities, which current end-to-end models are expected to learn implicitly by observing aligned sentences in bilingual corpora. In this work, we ask: How well do MT models learn coreference resolution from implicit signal? To answer this question, we develop an evaluation methodology that derives coreference clusters from MT output and evaluates them without requiring annotations in the target language. We further evaluate several prominent open-source and commercial MT systems, translating from English to six target languages, and compare them to state-of-the-art coreference resolvers on three challenging benchmarks. Our results show that the monolingual resolvers greatly outperform MT models. Motivated by this result, we experiment with different methods for incorporating the output of coreference resolution models in MT, showing improvement over strong baselines.