  The study investigates the effectiveness of utilizing multimodal information
in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). While prior research focused on using
multimodal data in low-resource scenarios, this study examines how image
features impact translation when added to a large-scale, pre-trained unimodal
NMT system. Surprisingly, the study finds that images might be redundant in
this context. Additionally, the research introduces synthetic noise to assess
whether images help the model deal with textual noise. Multimodal models
slightly outperform text-only models in noisy settings, even with random
images. The study's experiments translate from English to Hindi, Bengali, and
Malayalam, outperforming state-of-the-art benchmarks significantly.
Interestingly, the effect of visual context varies with source text noise: no
visual context works best for non-noisy translations, cropped image features
are optimal for low noise, and full image features work better in high-noise
scenarios. This sheds light on the role of visual context, especially in noisy
settings, opening up a new research direction for Noisy Neural Machine
Translation in multimodal setups. The research emphasizes the importance of
combining visual and textual information for improved translation in various
environments.
