Is Machine Translation Ripe for Cross-Lingual Sentiment Classification?

Recent advances in Machine Translation (MT) have brought forth a new paradigm for building NLP applications in low-resource scenarios. To build a sentiment classifier for a language with no labeled resources, one can translate labeled data from another language, then train a classifier on the translated text. This can be viewed as a domain adaptation problem, where labeled translations and test data have some mismatch. Various prior work have achieved positive results using this approach. In this opinion piece, we take a step back and make some general statements about crosslingual adaptation problems. First, we claim that domain mismatch is not caused by MT errors, and accuracy degradation will occur even in the case of perfect MT. Second, we argue that the cross-lingual adaptation problem is qualitatively different from other (monolingual) adaptation problems in NLP; thus new adaptation algorithms ought to be considered. This paper will describe a series of carefullydesigned experiments that led us to these conclusions.