Li Chunyou


2022

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Towards Making the Most of Pre-trained Translation Model for Quality Estimation
Li Chunyou | Di Hui | Huang Hui | Ouchi Kazushige | Chen Yufeng | Liu Jian | Xu Jinan
Proceedings of the 21st Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

“Machine translation quality estimation (QE) aims to evaluate the quality of machine translation automatically without relying on any reference. One common practice is applying the translation model as a feature extractor. However, there exist several discrepancies between the translation model and the QE model. The translation model is trained in an autoregressive manner, while the QE model is performed in a non-autoregressive manner. Besides, the translation model only learns to model human-crafted parallel data, while the QE model needs to model machinetranslated noisy data. In order to bridge these discrepancies, we propose two strategies to posttrain the translation model, namely Conditional Masked Language Modeling (CMLM) and Denoising Restoration (DR). Specifically, CMLM learns to predict masked tokens at the target side conditioned on the source sentence. DR firstly introduces noise to the target side of parallel data, and the model is trained to detect and recover the introduced noise. Both strategies can adapt the pre-trained translation model to the QE-style prediction task. Experimental results show that our model achieves impressive results, significantly outperforming the baseline model, verifying the effectiveness of our proposed methods.”