Effective Parallel Corpus Mining using Bilingual Sentence Embeddings
Mandy Guo, Qinlan Shen, Yinfei Yang, Heming Ge, Daniel Cer, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego, Keith Stevens, Noah Constant, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Brian Strope, Ray Kurzweil
Abstract
This paper presents an effective approach for parallel corpus mining using bilingual sentence embeddings. Our embedding models are trained to produce similar representations exclusively for bilingual sentence pairs that are translations of each other. This is achieved using a novel training method that introduces hard negatives consisting of sentences that are not translations but have some degree of semantic similarity. The quality of the resulting embeddings are evaluated on parallel corpus reconstruction and by assessing machine translation systems trained on gold vs. mined sentence pairs. We find that the sentence embeddings can be used to reconstruct the United Nations Parallel Corpus (Ziemski et al., 2016) at the sentence-level with a precision of 48.9% for en-fr and 54.9% for en-es. When adapted to document-level matching, we achieve a parallel document matching accuracy that is comparable to the significantly more computationally intensive approach of Uszkoreit et al. (2010). Using reconstructed parallel data, we are able to train NMT models that perform nearly as well as models trained on the original data (within 1-2 BLEU).- Anthology ID:
- W18-6317
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Research Papers
- Month:
- October
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- Brussels, Belgium
- Editors:
- Ondřej Bojar, Rajen Chatterjee, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Yvette Graham, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz, Matteo Negri, Aurélie Névéol, Mariana Neves, Matt Post, Lucia Specia, Marco Turchi, Karin Verspoor
- Venue:
- WMT
- SIG:
- SIGMT
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 165–176
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W18-6317
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W18-6317
- Cite (ACL):
- Mandy Guo, Qinlan Shen, Yinfei Yang, Heming Ge, Daniel Cer, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego, Keith Stevens, Noah Constant, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Brian Strope, and Ray Kurzweil. 2018. Effective Parallel Corpus Mining using Bilingual Sentence Embeddings. In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Research Papers, pages 165–176, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Effective Parallel Corpus Mining using Bilingual Sentence Embeddings (Guo et al., WMT 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/W18-6317.pdf
- Data
- WMT 2014