Machine Translation with Binary Feedback: a Large-Margin Approach

Avneesh Saluja, Ian Lane, Ying Zhang


Abstract
Viewing machine translation as a structured classification problem has provided a gateway for a host of structured prediction techniques to enter the field. In particular, large-margin structured prediction methods for discriminative training of feature weights, such as the structured perceptron or MIRA, have started to match or exceed the performance of existing methods such as MERT. One issue with structured problems in general is the difficulty in obtaining fully structured labels, e.g., in machine translation, obtaining reference translations or parallel sentence corpora for arbitrary language pairs. Another issue, more specific to the translation domain, is the difficulty in online training of machine translation systems, since existing methods often require bilingual knowledge to correct translation output online. We propose a solution to these two problems, by demonstrating a way to incorporate binary-labeled feedback (i.e., feedback on whether a translation hypothesis is a “good” or understandable one or not), a form of supervision that can be easily integrated in an online manner, into a machine translation framework. Experimental results show marked improvement by incorporating binary feedback on unseen test data, with gains exceeding 5.5 BLEU points.
Anthology ID:
2012.amta-papers.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Research Papers
Month:
October 28-November 1
Year:
2012
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Venue:
AMTA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2012.amta-papers.14
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Avneesh Saluja, Ian Lane, and Ying Zhang. 2012. Machine Translation with Binary Feedback: a Large-Margin Approach. In Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Research Papers, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
Machine Translation with Binary Feedback: a Large-Margin Approach (Saluja et al., AMTA 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2012.amta-papers.14.pdf