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Effective Soft-Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11839))

Abstract

Domain mismatch between training data and test data often degrades translation quality. It is necessary to make domain adaptation for machine translation tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel method to tackle Neural Machine Translation (NMT) domain adaptation issue, where a soft-domain adapter (SDA) is added in the encoder-decoder NMT framework. Our SDA automatically learns domain representations from the training corpus, and dynamically compute domain-aware context for inputs which can guide the decoder to generate domain-aware translations. Our method can softly leverage domain information to translate source sentences, which can not only improve the translation quality on specific domain but also be robust and scalable on different domains. Experiments on Chinese-English and English-French tasks show that our proposed method can significantly improve the translation quality of in-domain test sets, without performance sacrifice of out-of-domain/general-domain data sets.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the rest of this paper, the characters in bold refer to vectors.

  2. 2.

    LDC2002E17, LDC2002E18, LDC2003E07, LDC2003E14, LDC2005E83, LDC2005T06, LDC2005T10, LDC2006E17, LDC2006E26, LDC2006E34, LDC2006E85, LDC2006E92, LDC2006T06, LDC2004T08, LDC2005T10.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/rsennrich/subword-nmt.

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Correspondence to Shuangzhi Wu .

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Wu, S., Zhang, D., Zhou, M. (2019). Effective Soft-Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation. 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 11839. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32236-6_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32236-6_22

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32235-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32236-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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