Additive Interventions Yield Robust Multi-Domain Machine Translation Models

Elijah Rippeth, Matt Post


Abstract
Additive interventions are a recently-proposed mechanism for controlling target-side attributes in neural machine translation by modulating the encoder’s representation of a source sequence as opposed to manipulating the raw source sequence as seen in most previous tag-based approaches. In this work we examine the role of additive interventions in a large-scale multi-domain machine translation setting and compare its performance in various inference scenarios. We find that while the performance difference is small between intervention-based systems and tag-based systems when the domain label matches the test domain, intervention-based systems are robust to label error, making them an attractive choice under label uncertainty. Further, we find that the superiority of single-domain fine-tuning comes under question when training data is scaled, contradicting previous findings.
Anthology ID:
2022.wmt-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
220–232
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wmt-1.14
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elijah Rippeth and Matt Post. 2022. Additive Interventions Yield Robust Multi-Domain Machine Translation Models. In Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT), pages 220–232, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Additive Interventions Yield Robust Multi-Domain Machine Translation Models (Rippeth & Post, WMT 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.wmt-1.14.pdf