In the era of gigantic language models, and in our case, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, where merely size seems to matter, we’ve been asking ourselves, is it healthy to just feed our NMT model with more and more data? In this presentation, we want to show our findings on the impact of NMT performance of different data “nutrients” we were feeding our models. We have explored the impact of quantity, quality and the type of data we feed to our English-Arabic NMT models. The presentation will show the impact of adding millions of parallel sentences into our training data as opposed to a much smaller data set with much higher quality, and the results from additional experiments with different data nutrients. We will highlight our learnings, challenges and share insights from our Linguistics Quality Assurance team, on what are the advantages and disadvantages of each type of data source and define the criteria of high-quality data with respect to a healthy NMT diet.

To unlock the value of high-quality bilingual translated documents we need parallel data. With sentence-aligned translation pairs, we can fuel our neural machine translation, customize MT or create translation memories for our clients. To automate this process, automatic segmentation and alignment are required. Despite Arabic being the fifth biggest language in the world, language technology for Arabic is many times way behind other languages. We will show how we struggled to find a proper sentence segmentation for Arabic and instead explored different frameworks, from statistical to deep learning, to end up fine-tuning our own Arabic DL segmentation model. We will highlight our learnings and challenges with segmenting and aligning Arabic and English bilingual data. Finally, we will show the impact on our proprietary NMT engine as we started to unlock the value and could leverage data that had been translated offline, outside CAT tools, as well as comparable corpora, to feed our NMT.