Evaluating the Impact of Verbal Multiword Expressions on Machine Translation

This repository accompanies the paper “Evaluating the Impact of Verbal Multiword Expressions on Machine Translation.”

It provides:

• the processed artifacts used in the paper, released under preset/
• the scripts required to rebuild datasets from source materials
• the pipelines to rerun the VMWE and WMT experiments

The paper studies how verbal multiword expressions (VMWEs) affect machine translation, with a focus on:

• VID — verbal idioms, e.g. spill the beans
• VPC — verb-particle constructions, e.g. give up
• LVC — light verb constructions, e.g. take a walk

Main finding: VMWEs consistently reduce translation quality, and a substantial portion of that degradation is attributable to the VMWE itself rather than to overall sentence difficulty.

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Contents

• Quick Start
• Environment Setup
• Required Credentials
• Experiment Scope
• Released Artifacts in preset/
• Reproducing the Pipelines
• Citation
• License

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Quick Start

If you only want to inspect the released paper artifacts and do not need to run the code, start in preset/.

Recommended entry points:

1. Main VMWE dataset results
   preset/VMWE/MT_eval/

2. Paraphrase support analysis
   preset/VMWE/MT_para_eval/

3. WMT summary tables

   • preset/WMT/WMT_MT.csv
   • preset/WMT/WMT_Human.csv

4. Per-example WMT subsets

   • preset/WMT/MT/
   • preset/WMT/Human/

For a file-by-file mapping to the paper, see Released Artifacts in preset/.

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Environment Setup

We recommend using a uv-managed virtual environment.

uv venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install --torch-backend=auto -r requirements.txt
uv pip install --no-build-isolation flash-attn==2.7.4.post1

If you prefer not to activate the environment manually, you can also use uv run.

Dependency Notes

Some resources are downloaded automatically on first use, including:

• Hugging Face model weights
• COMET / MetricX resources
• nltk
• spaCy's en_core_web_sm

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Hardware Requirements

Notes

• Memory requirements may vary by checkpoint, transformers version, and parallelization strategy.
• If heavy stages are run sequentially, the same 3-GPU machine can usually be reused across paraphrase, MT, and QE by reallocating devices.
• If you cannot host Llama-3.3-70B, use --paraphrase-model-id to substitute another paraphrasing backend.

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Required Credentials

Some experiments require external credentials or gated access.

Google Translate

Requires either:

• GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT, or
• --google-project-id

You must also have valid Google Cloud credentials configured. See the official Google Cloud authentication guide.

OpenAI-based Reclassification

Requires:

• OPENAI_API_KEY

Gated Hugging Face Models

Some checkpoints require:

• accepted model licenses
• an authenticated Hugging Face session

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Experiment Scope

Main VMWE Experiment

Datasets

• LVC
• VPC
• VID
• Non_VMWE (contrast set)

Language directions

• en-cs
• en-de
• en-es
• en-ja
• en-ru
• en-tr
• en-zh

MT systems

• Google
• GemmaX2
• LLaMAX
• phi4
• Madlad
• M2M100
• opus
• seamless

QE models

• MetricX
• xCOMET

WMT Analysis

Years

• WMT 2017–2024

Language pairs

• en-cs
• en-de
• en-ru
• en-zh

Comparison types

• Human comparisons
• MT system comparisons

GPT-4.1 and GPT-5.1 appear only as support experiments in preset/VMWE/MT_eval/. They are included in the released artifacts but are not exposed as runnable public backends in the reproduction scripts.

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Released Artifacts in preset/

The preset/ directory contains the processed outputs used in the paper, including dataset derivatives and experiment outputs produced by the MT, evaluation, extraction, and summary pipelines.

Mapping from Paper Sections to Released Files

File Naming Conventions

preset/VMWE/MT_eval/

Files follow:

<DATASET>_<PAIR>.csv

Example:

LVC_en-cs.csv

These files contain fields such as:

• src
• VMWE candidate columns
• mt
• metricx_score
• xcomet_score

preset/VMWE/MT_para_eval/

Files follow:

<DATASET>_<PAIR>_<VIEW>.csv

Where <VIEW> is one of:

• original — original source → original MT
• para — paraphrased source → paraphrased MT
• mixed — original source → paraphrased MT

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Reproducing the Pipelines

If you want to rebuild the datasets and rerun the experiments from the provided scripts rather than using the released preset/ artifacts, follow the steps below.

1. Build the VMWE Datasets

Downloads source resources and constructs the core CSV datasets:

• LVC
• VPC
• VID
• Non_VMWE
• VID_dictionary

python scripts/build_vmwe_datasets.py

2. Reproduce Main VMWE MT + QE Results

Runs the primary MT and evaluation pipeline.

python scripts/reproduce_vmwe_mt_eval.py \
  --stage all \
  --models GemmaX2 LLaMAX phi4 Madlad M2M100 opus seamless Google \
  --pairs en-cs en-de en-es en-ja en-ru en-tr en-zh \
  --datasets LVC VPC VID Non_VMWE \
  --metrics metricx xcomet

Useful resource-management flags include:

• --translation-gpus
• --metricx-gpus
• --xcomet-gpus
• --parallel-jobs
• --google-project-id

3. Reproduce the Paraphrase Support Experiment

python scripts/reproduce_vmwe_para_mt_eval.py \
  --stage all \
  --models GemmaX2 LLaMAX phi4 Madlad M2M100 opus seamless Google \
  --pairs en-cs en-de en-es en-ja en-ru en-tr en-zh \
  --datasets LVC VPC VID \
  --metrics metricx xcomet

4. Build WMT 2017–2024 Datasets

Downloads and restructures WMT data into:

datasets/WMT/<year>/<Human|MT>/<pair>/<system>.csv

python scripts/build_wmt_datasets.py --years 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024

5. Build the WMT VMWE Pipeline and Final Summaries

To reproduce the released paper-style outputs using the shipped preset classifications:

python scripts/build_wmt_vmwe_pipeline.py \
  --classification preset \
  --use-preset-final-summary

6. Optional: Full WMT Reclassification

To rerun WMT candidate classification from scratch using an API model:

python scripts/build_wmt_vmwe_pipeline.py \
  --classification api \
  --openai-model gpt-4o

This step requires OPENAI_API_KEY.

Outputs from API-based reclassification may not be byte-identical to the released preset files.

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Citation

If you use this repository, please cite:

@misc{liu2025evaluatingimpactverbalmultiword,
      title={Evaluating the Impact of Verbal Multiword Expressions on Machine Translation}, 
      author={Linfeng Liu and Saptarshi Ghosh and Tianyu Jiang},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2508.17458},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17458}, 
}

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License

This project is released under the MIT License.