MAX-ISI System at WMT23 Discourse-Level Literary Translation Task

AbstractThis paper describes our translation systems for the WMT23 shared task. We participated in the discourse-level literary translation task - constrained track. In our methodology, we conduct a comparative analysis between the conventional Transformer model and the recently introduced MEGA model, which exhibits enhanced capabilities in modeling long-range sequences compared to the traditional Transformers. To explore whether language models can more effectively harness document-level context using paragraph-level data, we took the approach of aggregating sentences into paragraphs from the original literary dataset provided by the organizers. This paragraph-level data was utilized in both the Transformer and MEGA models. To ensure a fair comparison across all systems, we employed a sentence-alignment strategy to reverse our translation results from the paragraph-level back to the sentence-level alignment. Finally, our evaluation process encompassed sentence-level metrics such as BLEU, as well as two document-level metrics: d-BLEU and BlonDe.