Within the field of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), the neural approach (NMT) has recently emerged as the first technology able to challenge the long-standing dominance of phrase-based approaches (PBMT). In particular, at the IWSLT 2015 evaluation campaign, NMT outperformed well established state-of-the-art PBMT systems on English-German, a language pair known to be particularly hard because of morphology and syntactic differences. To understand in what respects NMT provides better translation quality than PBMT, we perform a detailed analysis of neural versus phrase-based SMT outputs, leveraging high quality post-edits performed by professional translators on the IWSLT data. For the first time, our analysis provides useful insights on what linguistic phenomena are best modeled by neural models -- such as the reordering of verbs -- while pointing out other aspects that remain to be improved.

本文分析了神经网络机器翻译（NMT）与基于短语的机器翻译（PBMT）在英语-德语翻译数据集上的表现，从专业翻译的高质量后编辑结果中发现神经网络机器翻译在表述动词重新排序等语言现象时具有更好的建模能力，但仍有需要改进的方面。

神经网络与基于短语的机器翻译质量比较：一个案例研究