Hongyu Liu


2025

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Enhancing Neural Machine Translation Through Target Language Data: A kNN-LM Approach for Domain Adaptation
Abudurexiti Reheman | Hongyu Liu | Junhao Ruan | Abudukeyumu Abudula | Yingfeng Luo | Tong Xiao | JingBo Zhu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Neural machine translation (NMT) has advanced significantly, yet challenges remain in adapting to new domains . In scenarios where bilingual data is limited, this issue is further exacerbated. To address this, we propose kNN-LM-NMT, a method that leverages semantically similar target language sentences in the kNN framework. Our approach generates a probability distribution over these sentences during decoding, and this distribution is then interpolated with the NMT model’s distribution. Additionally, we introduce an n-gram-based approach to focus on similar fragments, enabling the model to avoid the noise introduced by the non-similar parts. To enhance accuracy, we further incorporate cross-lingual retrieval similarity to refine the kNN probability distribution. Extensive experiments on multi-domain datasets demonstrate significant performance improvements in both high-resource and low-resource scenarios. Our approach effectively extracts translation knowledge from limited target domain data, and well benefits from large-scale monolingual data for robust context representation.