Adaptation of Back-translation to Automatic Post-Editing for Synthetic Data Generation

WonKee Lee, Baikjin Jung, Jaehun Shin, Jong-Hyeok Lee


Abstract
Automatic Post-Editing (APE) aims to correct errors in the output of a given machine translation (MT) system. Although data-driven approaches have become prevalent also in the APE task as in many other NLP tasks, there has been a lack of qualified training data due to the high cost of manual construction. eSCAPE, a synthetic APE corpus, has been widely used to alleviate the data scarcity, but it might not address genuine APE corpora’s characteristic that the post-edited sentence should be a minimally edited revision of the given MT output. Therefore, we propose two new methods of synthesizing additional MT outputs by adapting back-translation to the APE task, obtaining robust enlargements of the existing synthetic APE training dataset. Experimental results on the WMT English-German APE benchmarks demonstrate that our enlarged datasets are effective in improving APE performance.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.322
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3685–3691
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.322
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.322
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
WonKee Lee, Baikjin Jung, Jaehun Shin, and Jong-Hyeok Lee. 2021. Adaptation of Back-translation to Automatic Post-Editing for Synthetic Data Generation. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 3685–3691, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Adaptation of Back-translation to Automatic Post-Editing for Synthetic Data Generation (Lee et al., EACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.322.pdf
Code
 wonkeelee/ape-backtranslation
Data
eSCAPE