Idioms in state-of-the-art Croatian-English and English-Croatian SMT systems

摘要

Idioms are well known for posing problems to non-native speakers, let alone machines. A failure to identify idioms often leads to unnatural, even hilarious outputs. This paper investigates the treatment of idioms in state-of-the art SMT systems involving English and Croatian. First we introduce the concept of idioms. Then we construct three short stories abundant with idioms per each language, and translate them into the other language by two state-of-the-art SMT systems. Next we manually inspect the outputs and present results. For the purpose of conducting analysis, we devise an error taxonomy for handling idioms.