An Evaluation of Translation Quality by Homograph Disambiguation in Korean-X Neural Machine Translation Systems

한-X 신경기계번역시스템에서 동형이의어 분별에 따른 변역질 평가

Neural machine translation (NMT) has recently achieved the state-of-the-art performance. However, it is reported failing in the word sense disambiguation (WSD) for several popular language pairs. In this paper, we explore the extent to which NMT systems are able to disambiguate the Korean homographs. Homographs, words with different meanings but the same written form, cause the word choice problems for NMT systems. Consistent with the popular language pairs, we discover that NMT systems fail to translate Korean homographs correctly. We provide a Korean word sense disambiguation tool-UTagger to use for improvement of NMT's translation quality. We conducted translation experiments using Korean-English and Korean-Vietnamese language pairs. The experimental results show that UTagger can significantly improve the translation quality of NMT in terms of the BLEU, TER, and DLRATIO evaluation metrics.