Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Lexical ambiguity poses one of the greatest challenges in the field of Machine Translation. Over the last few decades, multiple efforts have been undertaken to investigate incorrect translations caused by the polysemous nature of words. Within this body of research, some studies have posited that models pick up semantic biases existing in the training data, thus producing translation errors. In this paper, we present DiBiMT, the first entirely manually-curated evaluation benchmark which enables an extensive study of semantic biases in Machine Translation of nominal and verbal words in five different language combinations, namely, English and one or other of the following languages: Chinese, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. Furthermore, we test state-of-the-art Machine Translation systems, both commercial and non-commercial ones, against our new test bed and provide a thorough statistical and linguistic analysis of the results. We release DiBiMT at https://nlp.uniroma1.it/dibimt as a closed benchmark with a public leaderboard.