Can Neural Machine Translation be Improved with User Feedback?

Julia Kreutzer, Shahram Khadivi, Evgeny Matusov, Stefan Riezler


Abstract
We present the first real-world application of methods for improving neural machine translation (NMT) with human reinforcement, based on explicit and implicit user feedback collected on the eBay e-commerce platform. Previous work has been confined to simulation experiments, whereas in this paper we work with real logged feedback for offline bandit learning of NMT parameters. We conduct a thorough analysis of the available explicit user judgments—five-star ratings of translation quality—and show that they are not reliable enough to yield significant improvements in bandit learning. In contrast, we successfully utilize implicit task-based feedback collected in a cross-lingual search task to improve task-specific and machine translation quality metrics.
Anthology ID:
N18-3012
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 3 (Industry Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans - Louisiana
Editors:
Srinivas Bangalore, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, Yunyao Li
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
92–105
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-3012
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-3012
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Julia Kreutzer, Shahram Khadivi, Evgeny Matusov, and Stefan Riezler. 2018. Can Neural Machine Translation be Improved with User Feedback?. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 3 (Industry Papers), pages 92–105, New Orleans - Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can Neural Machine Translation be Improved with User Feedback? (Kreutzer et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
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