A Challenge Set for French --> English Machine Translation

Abstract: We present a challenge set for French --> English machine translation based on the approach introduced in Isabelle, Cherry and Foster (EMNLP 2017). Such challenge sets are made up of sentences that are expected to be relatively difficult for machines to translate correctly because their most straightforward translations tend to be linguistically divergent. We present here a set of 506 manually constructed French sentences, 307 of which are targeted to the same kinds of structural divergences as in the paper mentioned above. The remaining 199 sentences are designed to test the ability of the systems to correctly translate difficult grammatical words such as prepositions. We report on the results of using this challenge set for testing two different systems, namely Google Translate and DEEPL, each on two different dates (October 2017 and January 2018). All the resulting data are made publicly available.