Adaptation and Combination of NMT Systems: The KIT Translation Systems for IWSLT 2016

Eunah Cho, Jan Niehues, Thanh-Le Ha, Matthias Sperber, Mohammed Mediani, Alex Waibel


Abstract
In this paper, we present the KIT systems of the IWSLT 2016 machine translation evaluation. We participated in the machine translation (MT) task as well as the spoken language language translation (SLT) track for English→German and German→English translation. We use attentional neural machine translation (NMT) for all our submissions. We investigated different methods to adapt the system using small in-domain data as well as methods to train the system on these small corpora. In addition, we investigated methods to combine NMT systems that encode the input as well as the output differently. We combine systems using different vocabularies, reverse translation systems, multi-source translation system. In addition, we used pre-translation systems that facilitate phrase-based machine translation systems. Results show that applying domain adaptation and ensemble technique brings a crucial improvement of 3-4 BLEU points over the baseline system. In addition, system combination using n-best lists yields further 1-2 BLEU points.
Anthology ID:
2016.iwslt-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation
Month:
December 8-9
Year:
2016
Address:
Seattle, Washington D.C
Editors:
Mauro Cettolo, Jan Niehues, Sebastian Stüker, Luisa Bentivogli, Rolando Cattoni, Marcello Federico
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2016.iwslt-1.16
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eunah Cho, Jan Niehues, Thanh-Le Ha, Matthias Sperber, Mohammed Mediani, and Alex Waibel. 2016. Adaptation and Combination of NMT Systems: The KIT Translation Systems for IWSLT 2016. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation, Seattle, Washington D.C. International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation.
Cite (Informal):
Adaptation and Combination of NMT Systems: The KIT Translation Systems for IWSLT 2016 (Cho et al., IWSLT 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2016.iwslt-1.16.pdf