Backtranslation in Neural Morphological Inflection

Ling Liu, Mans Hulden


Abstract
Backtranslation is a common technique for leveraging unlabeled data in low-resource scenarios in machine translation. The method is directly applicable to morphological inflection generation if unlabeled word forms are available. This paper evaluates the potential of backtranslation for morphological inflection using data from six languages with labeled data drawn from the SIGMORPHON shared task resource and unlabeled data from different sources. Our core finding is that backtranslation can offer modest improvements in low-resource scenarios, but only if the unlabeled data is very clean and has been filtered by the same annotation standards as the labeled data.
Anthology ID:
2021.insights-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Venue:
insights
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
81–88
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.insights-1.13
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.insights-1.13
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ling Liu and Mans Hulden. 2021. Backtranslation in Neural Morphological Inflection. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP, pages 81–88, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Backtranslation in Neural Morphological Inflection (Liu & Hulden, insights 2021)
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