Adapting Entities across Languages and Cultures
Denis Peskov, Viktor Hangya, Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber, Alexander Fraser · 2021
How would you explain Bill Gates to a German?He is associated with founding a company in the United States, so perhaps the German founder Carl Benz could stand in for Gates in those contexts.This type of translation is called adaptation in the translation community (Vinay and Darbelnet, 1995).Until now, this task has not been done computationally.Automatic adaptation could be used in natural language processing for machine translation and indirectly for generating new question answering datasets and education.We propose two automatic methods and compare them to human results for this novel NLP task.First, a structured knowledge base adapts named entities using their shared properties.Second, vector arithmetic and orthogonal embedding mappings identify better candidates, but at the expense of interpretable features.We evaluate our methods through a new dataset 1 of human adaptations.2 Wer ist Bill Gates?We define cultural adaptation and motivate its application for tasks like creating culturally-centered training data for QA.Vinay and Darbelnet (1995) define adaptation as translation in which the relationship not the literal meaning between the receiver and the content needs to be recreated.You could formulate our task as a tradi-D