@inproceedings{hu-neubig-2021-phrase,
    title = "Phrase-level Active Learning for Neural Machine Translation",
    author = "Hu, Junjie  and
      Neubig, Graham",
    editor = "Barrault, Loic  and
      Bojar, Ondrej  and
      Bougares, Fethi  and
      Chatterjee, Rajen  and
      Costa-jussa, Marta R.  and
      Federmann, Christian  and
      Fishel, Mark  and
      Fraser, Alexander  and
      Freitag, Markus  and
      Graham, Yvette  and
      Grundkiewicz, Roman  and
      Guzman, Paco  and
      Haddow, Barry  and
      Huck, Matthias  and
      Yepes, Antonio Jimeno  and
      Koehn, Philipp  and
      Kocmi, Tom  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Morishita, Makoto  and
      Monz, Christof",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2021.wmt-1.117/",
    pages = "1087--1099",
    abstract = "Neural machine translation (NMT) is sensitive to domain shift. In this paper, we address this problem in an active learning setting where we can spend a given budget on translating in-domain data, and gradually fine-tune a pre-trained out-of-domain NMT model on the newly translated data. Existing active learning methods for NMT usually select sentences based on uncertainty scores, but these methods require costly translation of full sentences even when only one or two key phrases within the sentence are informative. To address this limitation, we re-examine previous work from the phrase-based machine translation (PBMT) era that selected not full sentences, but rather individual phrases. However, while incorporating these phrases into PBMT systems was relatively simple, it is less trivial for NMT systems, which need to be trained on full sequences to capture larger structural properties of sentences unique to the new domain. To overcome these hurdles, we propose to select both full sentences and individual phrases from unlabelled data in the new domain for routing to human translators. In a German-English translation task, our active learning approach achieves consistent improvements over uncertainty-based sentence selection methods, improving up to 1.2 BLEU score over strong active learning baselines."
}