Active Learning for Massively Parallel Translation of Constrained Text into Low Resource Languages

Zhong Zhou, Alex Waibel

Abstract
We translate a closed text that is known in advance and available in many languages into a new and severely low resource language. Most human translation efforts adopt a portionbased approach to translate consecutive pages/chapters in order, which may not suit machine translation. We compare the portion-based approach that optimizes coherence of the text locally with the random sampling approach that increases coverage of the text globally. Our results show that the random sampling approach performs better. When training on a seed corpus of ∼1,000 lines from the Bible and testing on the rest of the Bible (∼30,000 lines), random sampling gives a performance gain of +11.0 BLEU using English as a simulated low resource language, and +4.9 BLEU using Eastern Pokomchi, a Mayan language. Furthermore, we compare three ways of updating machine translation models with increasing amount of human post-edited data through iterations. We find that adding newly post-edited data to training after vocabulary update without self-supervision performs the best. We propose an algorithm for human and machine to work together seamlessly to translate a closed text into a severely low resource language.
Anthology ID:
2021.mtsummit-loresmt.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Virtual
Editors:
John Ortega, Atul Kr. Ojha, Katharina Kann, Chao-Hong Liu
Venue:
LoResMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Note:
Pages:
32–43
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.mtsummit-loresmt.4
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhong Zhou and Alex Waibel. 2021. Active Learning for Massively Parallel Translation of Constrained Text into Low Resource Languages. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT2021), pages 32–43, Virtual. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
Active Learning for Massively Parallel Translation of Constrained Text into Low Resource Languages (Zhou & Waibel, LoResMT 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2021.mtsummit-loresmt.4.pdf
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