The Impact of Sentence Alignment Errors on Phrase-Based Machine Translation Performance
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
When parallel or comparable corpora are har-vested from the web, there is typically a trade-off between the size and quality of the data. In order to improve quality, corpus collection ef-forts often attempt to fix or remove misaligned sentence pairs. But, at the same time, Statis-tical Machine Translation (SMT) systems are widely assumed to be relatively robust to sen-tence alignment errors. However, there is little empirical evidence to support and character-ize this robustness. This contribution investi-gates the impact of sentence alignment errors on a typical phrase-based SMT system. We confirm that SMT systems are highly tolerant to noise, and that performance only degrades seriously at very high noise levels. Our find-ings suggest that when collecting larger, noisy parallel data for training phrase-based SMT, cleaning up by trying to detect and remove in-correct alignments can actually degrade per-formance. Although fixing errors, when ap-plicable, is a preferable strategy to removal, its benefits only become apparent for fairly high misalignment rates. We provide several expla-nations to support these findings. 1
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it