Improving Robustness of Neural Machine Translation with Multi-task Learning

Shuyan Zhou, Xiangkai Zeng, Yingqi Zhou, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Graham Neubig


Abstract
While neural machine translation (NMT) achieves remarkable performance on clean, in-domain text, performance is known to degrade drastically when facing text which is full of typos, grammatical errors and other varieties of noise. In this work, we propose a multi-task learning algorithm for transformer-based MT systems that is more resilient to this noise. We describe our submission to the WMT 2019 Robustness shared task based on this method. Our model achieves a BLEU score of 32.8 on the shared task French to English dataset, which is 7.1 BLEU points higher than the baseline vanilla transformer trained with clean text.
Anthology ID:
W19-5368
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
565–571
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-5368
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-5368
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuyan Zhou, Xiangkai Zeng, Yingqi Zhou, Antonios Anastasopoulos, and Graham Neubig. 2019. Improving Robustness of Neural Machine Translation with Multi-task Learning. In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1), pages 565–571, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Robustness of Neural Machine Translation with Multi-task Learning (Zhou et al., WMT 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/W19-5368.pdf
Code
 shuyanzhou/multitask_transformer
Data
MTNT