Pronoun-Targeted Fine-tuning for NMT with Hybrid Losses

Prathyusha Jwalapuram, Shafiq Joty, Youlin Shen

Machine Translation and Multilinguality Long Paper

Zoom-5D: Nov 17, Zoom-5D: Nov 17 (08:00-09:00 UTC) [Join Zoom Meeting]

You can open the pre-recorded video in a separate window.

Abstract: Popular Neural Machine Translation model training uses strategies like backtranslation to improve BLEU scores, requiring large amounts of additional data and training. We introduce a class of conditional generative-discriminative hybrid losses that we use to fine-tune a trained machine translation model. Through a combination of targeted fine-tuning objectives and intuitive re-use of the training data the model has failed to adequately learn from, we improve the model performance of both a sentence-level and a contextual model without using any additional data. We target the improvement of pronoun translations through our fine-tuning and evaluate our models on a pronoun benchmark testset. Our sentence-level model shows a 0.5 BLEU improvement on both the WMT14 and the IWSLT13 De-En testsets, while our contextual model achieves the best results, improving from 31.81 to 32 BLEU on WMT14 De-En testset, and from 32.10 to 33.13 on the IWSLT13 De-En testset, with corresponding improvements in pronoun translation. We further show the generalizability of our method by reproducing the improvements on two additional language pairs, Fr-En and Cs-En.
NOTE: Video may display a random order of authors. Correct author list is at the top of this page.

Connected Papers in EMNLP2020

Similar Papers

Dynamic Data Selection and Weighting for Iterative Back-Translation
Zi-Yi Dou, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Graham Neubig,
Pre-training Multilingual Neural Machine Translation by Leveraging Alignment Information
Zehui Lin, Xiao Pan, Mingxuan Wang, Xipeng Qiu, Jiangtao Feng, Hao Zhou, Lei Li,
Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation
Jiatao Gu, Yinhan Liu, Naman Goyal, Xian Li, Sergey Edunov, Marjan Ghazvininejad, Mike Lewis, Luke Zettlemoyer,