Evaluating the Word Sense Disambiguation Performance of Statistical Machine Translation

We present the first known empirical test of an increasingly common speculative claim, by evaluating a representative Chinese-to-English SMT model directly on word sense disambiguation performance, using standard WSD evaluation methodology and datasets from the Senseval-3 Chinese lexical sample task. Much effort has been put in designing and evaluating dedicated word sense disambiguation (WSD) models, in particular with the Senseval series of workshops. At the same time, the recent improvements in the BLEU scores of statistical machine translation (SMT) suggests that SMT models are good at predicting the right translation of the words in source language sentences. Surprisingly however, the WSD accuracy of SMT models has never been evaluated and compared with that of the dedicated WSD models. We present controlled experiments showing the WSD accuracy of current typical SMT models to be significantly lower than that of all the dedicated WSD models considered. This tends to support the view that despite recent speculative claims to the contrary, current SMT models do have limitations in comparison with dedicated WSD models, and that SMT should benefit from the better predictions made by the WSD models.