Automatic Discrimination of Human and Neural Machine Translation in Multilingual Scenarios

We tackle the task of automatically discriminating between human and machine translations. As opposed to most previous work, we perform experiments in a multilingual setting, considering multiple languages and multilingual pretrained language models. We show that a classifier trained on parallel data with a single source language (in our case German–English) can still perform well on English translations that come from different source languages, even when the machine translations were produced by other systems than the one it was trained on. Additionally, we demonstrate that incorporating the source text in the input of a multilingual classifier improves (i) its accuracy and (ii) its robustness on cross-system evaluation, compared to a monolingual classifier. Furthermore, we find that using training data from multiple source languages (German, Russian, and Chinese) tends to improve the accuracy of both monolingual and multilingual classifiers. Finally, we show that bilingual classifiers and classifiers trained on multiple source languages benefit from being trained on longer text sequences, rather than on sentences.