Continuous Learning in Neural Machine Translation using Bilingual Dictionaries

Jan Niehues


Abstract
While recent advances in deep learning led to significant improvements in machine translation, neural machine translation is often still not able to continuously adapt to the environment. For humans, as well as for machine translation, bilingual dictionaries are a promising knowledge source to continuously integrate new knowledge. However, their exploitation poses several challenges: The system needs to be able to perform one-shot learning as well as model the morphology of source and target language. In this work, we proposed an evaluation framework to assess the ability of neural machine translation to continuously learn new phrases. We integrate one-shot learning methods for neural machine translation with different word representations and show that it is important to address both in order to successfully make use of bilingual dictionaries. By addressing both challenges we are able to improve the ability to translate new, rare words and phrases from 30% to up to 70%. The correct lemma is even generated by more than 90%.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.70
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
830–840
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.70
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.70
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jan Niehues. 2021. Continuous Learning in Neural Machine Translation using Bilingual Dictionaries. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 830–840, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Continuous Learning in Neural Machine Translation using Bilingual Dictionaries (Niehues, EACL 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.eacl-main.70.pdf