@inproceedings{khayrallah-etal-2020-simulated,
    title = "Simulated multiple reference training improves low-resource machine translation",
    author = "Khayrallah, Huda  and
      Thompson, Brian  and
      Post, Matt  and
      Koehn, Philipp",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.7",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.7",
    pages = "82--89",
    abstract = "Many valid translations exist for a given sentence, yet machine translation (MT) is trained with a single reference translation, exacerbating data sparsity in low-resource settings. We introduce Simulated Multiple Reference Training (SMRT), a novel MT training method that approximates the full space of possible translations by sampling a paraphrase of the reference sentence from a paraphraser and training the MT model to predict the paraphraser{'}s distribution over possible tokens. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SMRT in low-resource settings when translating to English, with improvements of 1.2 to 7.0 BLEU. We also find SMRT is complementary to back-translation.",
}