Bandits Don’t Follow Rules: Balancing Multi-Facet Machine Translation with Multi-Armed Bandits

Julia Kreutzer, David Vilar, Artem Sokolov


Abstract
Training data for machine translation (MT) is often sourced from a multitude of large corpora that are multi-faceted in nature, e.g. containing contents from multiple domains or different levels of quality or complexity. Naturally, these facets do not occur with equal frequency, nor are they equally important for the test scenario at hand. In this work, we propose to optimize this balance jointly with MT model parameters to relieve system developers from manual schedule design. A multi-armed bandit is trained to dynamically choose between facets in a way that is most beneficial for the MT system. We evaluate it on three different multi-facet applications: balancing translationese and natural training data, or data from multiple domains or multiple language pairs. We find that bandit learning leads to competitive MT systems across tasks, and our analysis provides insights into its learned strategies and the underlying data sets.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.274
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3190–3204
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.274
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.274
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Julia Kreutzer, David Vilar, and Artem Sokolov. 2021. Bandits Don’t Follow Rules: Balancing Multi-Facet Machine Translation with Multi-Armed Bandits. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 3190–3204, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bandits Don’t Follow Rules: Balancing Multi-Facet Machine Translation with Multi-Armed Bandits (Kreutzer et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2021.findings-emnlp.274.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2021.findings-emnlp.274.mp4
Data
OPUS-100