Improving Retrieval Augmented Neural Machine Translation by Controlling Source and Fuzzy-Match Interactions

Cuong Hoang, Devendra Sachan, Prashant Mathur, Brian Thompson, Marcello Federico


Abstract
We explore zero-shot adaptation, where a general-domain model has access to customer or domain specific parallel data at inference time, but not during training. We build on the idea of Retrieval Augmented Translation (RAT) where top-k in-domain fuzzy matches are found for the source sentence, and target-language translations of those fuzzy-matched sentences are provided to the translation model at inference time. We propose a novel architecture to control interactions between a source sentence and the top-k fuzzy target-language matches, and compare it to architectures from prior work. We conduct experiments in two language pairs (En-De and En-Fr) by training models on WMT data and testing them with five and seven multi-domain datasets, respectively. Our approach consistently outperforms the alternative architectures, improving BLEU across language pair, domain, and number k of fuzzy matches.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-eacl.22
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
289–295
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.22
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-eacl.22
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cuong Hoang, Devendra Sachan, Prashant Mathur, Brian Thompson, and Marcello Federico. 2023. Improving Retrieval Augmented Neural Machine Translation by Controlling Source and Fuzzy-Match Interactions. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023, pages 289–295, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Retrieval Augmented Neural Machine Translation by Controlling Source and Fuzzy-Match Interactions (Hoang et al., Findings 2023)
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