Naive regularizers for low-resource neural machine translation

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Neural machine translation models have little inductive bias, which can be a disadvantage in low-resource scenarios. They require large volumes of data and often perform poorly when limited data is available. We show that using naive regularization methods, based on sentence length, punctuation and word frequencies, to penalize translations that are very different from the input sentences, consistently improves the translation quality across multiple low-resource languages. We experiment with 12 language pairs, varying the training data size between 17k to 230k sentence pairs. Our best regularizer achieves an average increase of 1.5 BLEU score and 1.0 TER score across all the language pairs. For example, we achieve a BLEU score of 26.70 on the IWSLT15 English-Vietnamese translation task simply by using relative differences in punctuation as a regularizer.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInternational Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing in a Deep Learning World, RANLP 2019 - Proceedings
EditorsGalia Angelova, Ruslan Mitkov, Ivelina Nikolova, Irina Temnikova, Irina Temnikova
Number of pages10
PublisherIncoma Ltd
Publication date2019
Pages102-111
ISBN (Electronic)9789544520557
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Event12th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2019 - Varna, Bulgaria
Duration: 2 Sep 20194 Sep 2019

Conference

Conference12th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2019
LandBulgaria
ByVarna
Periode02/09/201904/09/2019

ID: 237806742