The Box is in the Pen: Evaluating Commonsense Reasoning in Neural Machine Translation Jie Hey∗, Tao Wangz∗, Deyi Xiongy, and Qun Liux y College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China z School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou, China x Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, Hong Kong, China
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[email protected] Abstract evidence for the need of commonsense knowl- edge in machine translation is “The box is in the Does neural machine translation yield transla- pen”, where machine translation is expected to per- tions that are congenial with common sense? form reasoning on the relative sizes of “box” and In this paper, we present a test suite to evalu- “pen”. Bar-Hillel also doubts that a machine, even ate the commonsense reasoning capability of equipped with extra-linguistic knowledge, would neural machine translation. The test suite consists of three test sets, covering lexical be able to reason with such knowledge sponta- and contextless/contextual syntactic ambiguity neously as human translators do (Bar-Hillel, 1960a; that requires commonsense knowledge to re- Macklovitch, 1995). solve. We manually create 1,200 triples, each Modern natural language processing (NLP) has of which contain a source sentence and two made tremendous progress, not only in building contrastive translations, involving 7 different abundant resources to develop linguistic insights, common sense types. Language models pre- but also in plenty of methodological practices. On trained on large-scale corpora, such as BERT, GPT-2, achieve a commonsense reasoning ac- the one hand, machine translation has been sub- curacy of lower than 72% on target transla- stantially advanced with large-scale parallel data tions of this test suite.