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Improved Quality Estimation of Machine Translation with Pre-trained Language Representation

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Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11838))

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Abstract

Translation quality estimation (QE) is a task of estimating the quality of translation output from an unknown machine translation (MT) system without reference at various granularity (sentence/word/phrase) levels, and it has been attracting much attention due to the potential to reduce post-editing human effort. However, QE suffers heavily from the fact that the quality annotation data remain expensive and small. In this paper, we focus on the limited QE data problem and seek to find how to utilize the high level latent features learned by the pre-trained language models for improving QE. Specifically, we explore three strategies to integrate the pre-trained language representations into QE models: (1) a mixed integration model, where the pre-trained language features are mixed with other features for QE; (2) a direct integration model, which regards the pre-trained language model as the only feature extracting component of the entire QE model; and (3) a constrained integration model, where a constraint mechanism is added to optimize the quality prediction based on the direct integration model. Experiments and analysis presented in this paper demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches on QE task.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/google-research/bert.

  2. 2.

    https://allennlp.org/elmo.

  3. 3.

    https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61370130, 61473294 and 61876198), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2015JBM033), the International Science and Technology Cooperation Program of China under grant No. K11F100010, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2018YJS043), Major Projects of Fundamental Research on Philosophy and Social Sciences of Henan Education Department (2016-JCZD-022), and Toshiba (China) Co., Ltd.

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Correspondence to Jinan Xu .

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Miao, G., Di, H., Xu, J., Yang, Z., Chen, Y., Ouchi, K. (2019). Improved Quality Estimation of Machine Translation with Pre-trained Language Representation. In: Tang, J., Kan, MY., Zhao, D., Li, S., Zan, H. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing. NLPCC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11838. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32233-5_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32233-5_32

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