Pronoun Translation in English–French Machine Translation:An Analysis of Error Types
Table 4: Meta-evaluation: Common error sources
['[EMPTY]', 'anaphoric it', 'anaphoric it', 'anaphoric it', 'anaphoric it', 'anaphoric they', 'anaphoric they', 'anaphoric they', 'anaphoric it/they', 'event it', 'pleonastic it', '[EMPTY]']
Note that the examples in the test suite were the same for all systems and many of the systems made similar errors on the same examples. This should be kept in mind when interpreting the numbers in this table. In the anaphoric it categories, there is a split between subject and non-subject pronouns. Bad translation is very common for non-subject pronouns, and this frequently means that the pronouns are simply omitted bby the MT systems. This happens far less frequently for subject it, where gender agreement is the most important problem, followed by wrong pronoun type, which in this category usually means that ce or another demonstrative was chosen where a personal pronoun would have been appropriate. The patterns for inter- and intra-sentential it are very similar, but the inter-sentential category has more wrong pronoun type cases. One possible explanation is that in the inter-sentential examples sentences often start with it’s, inviting confusion with pleonastic it. The context of the intra-sentential examples tends to include clues like content-bearing verbs that disambiguate the pronoun function more strongly.