Skip to main content

A Preliminary Attempt to Evaluate Machine Translations of Ukiyo-e Metadata Records

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Digital Libraries at Times of Massive Societal Transition (ICADL 2020)

Abstract

Providing multilingual metadata records for digital objects is a way expanding access to digital cultural collections. Recent advancements in deep learning techniques have made machine translation (MT) more accurate. Therefore, we evaluate the performance of three well-known MT systems (i.e., Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and DeepL Translator) in translating metadata records of ukiyo-e images from Japanese to English. We evaluate the quality of their translations with an automatic evaluation metric BLEU. The evaluation results show that DeepL Translator is better at translating ukiyo-e metadata records than Google Translate or Microsoft Translator, with Microsoft Translator performing the worst.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Chen, J., Azogu, O., Knudson, R.: Enabling multilingual information access to digital collections: an investigation of metadata records translation. In: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 467–468 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Chen, J., Ding, R., Jiang, S., Knudson, R.: A preliminary evaluation of metadata records machine translation. Electron. Libr. 30(2), 264–277 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. DeepL Translator. https://www.deepl.com/translator. Accessed 30 July 2020

  4. Edo-Tokyo Museum. https://digitalmuseum.rekibun.or.jp/app/selected/edo-tokyo. Accessed 21 July 2020

  5. Google Translate. https://translate.google.com/. Accessed 30 July 2020

  6. Goto, S., Lin, D., Ishida, T.: Crowdsourcing for evaluating machine translation quality. In: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014), pp. 3456–3463 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Isabelle, P., Cherry, C., Foster, G.: A challenge set approach to evaluating machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 2486–2496 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Lavie, A., Agarwal, A.: METEOR: an automatic metric for MT evaluation with high levels of correlation with human judgments. In: Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluation Measures for Machine Translation and/or Summarization, pp. 65–72 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Linguistic Data Consortium: Linguistic data annotation specification: assessment of fluency and adequacy in translations revision 1.5 (2005). http://web.archive.org/web/20100622130328/projects.ldc.upenn.edu/TIDES/ Translation/TransAssess04.pdf. Accessed 4 Aug 2020

  10. Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.metmuseum.org/. Accessed 21 July 2020

  11. Microsoft Translator. https://www.bing.com/translator. Accessed 30 July 2020

  12. Papineni, K., Roukos, S., Ward, T., Zhu, W.J.: BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 311–318 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Reyes Ayala, B., Knudson, R., Chen, J., Cao, G., Wang, X.: Metadata records machine translation combining multi-engine outputs with limited parallel data. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 69(1), 47–59 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Snover, M., Dorr, B., Schwartz, R., Micciulla, L., Makhoul, J.: A study of translation edit rate with targeted human annotation. In: Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation of the Americas, pp. 223–231 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Ukiyo-e Search System. https://ukiyo-e.org/. Accessed 21 July 2020

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 20K12567, 20K20135, and 19KK0256.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuting Song .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Song, Y., Batjargal, B., Maeda, A. (2020). A Preliminary Attempt to Evaluate Machine Translations of Ukiyo-e Metadata Records. In: Ishita, E., Pang, N.L.S., Zhou, L. (eds) Digital Libraries at Times of Massive Societal Transition. ICADL 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12504. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64452-9_24

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64452-9_24

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-64451-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-64452-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics