Dynamic Data Selection for Neural Machine Translation

Marlies van der Wees, Arianna Bisazza, Christof Monz


Abstract
Intelligent selection of training data has proven a successful technique to simultaneously increase training efficiency and translation performance for phrase-based machine translation (PBMT). With the recent increase in popularity of neural machine translation (NMT), we explore in this paper to what extent and how NMT can also benefit from data selection. While state-of-the-art data selection (Axelrod et al., 2011) consistently performs well for PBMT, we show that gains are substantially lower for NMT. Next, we introduce ‘dynamic data selection’ for NMT, a method in which we vary the selected subset of training data between different training epochs. Our experiments show that the best results are achieved when applying a technique we call ‘gradual fine-tuning’, with improvements up to +2.6 BLEU over the original data selection approach and up to +3.1 BLEU over a general baseline.
Anthology ID:
D17-1147
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1400–1410
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1147
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1147
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marlies van der Wees, Arianna Bisazza, and Christof Monz. 2017. Dynamic Data Selection for Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1400–1410, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dynamic Data Selection for Neural Machine Translation (van der Wees et al., EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1147.pdf
Code
 marliesvanderwees/dds-nmt