Self-Supervised Quality Estimation for Machine Translation

Yuanhang Zheng, Zhixing Tan, Meng Zhang, Mieradilijiang Maimaiti, Huanbo Luan, Maosong Sun, Qun Liu, Yang Liu


Abstract
Quality estimation (QE) of machine translation (MT) aims to evaluate the quality of machine-translated sentences without references and is important in practical applications of MT. Training QE models require massive parallel data with hand-crafted quality annotations, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive to obtain. To address the issue of the absence of annotated training data, previous studies attempt to develop unsupervised QE methods. However, very few of them can be applied to both sentence- and word-level QE tasks, and they may suffer from noises in the synthetic data. To reduce the negative impact of noises, we propose a self-supervised method for both sentence- and word-level QE, which performs quality estimation by recovering the masked target words. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous unsupervised methods on several QE tasks in different language pairs and domains.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.267
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3322–3334
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.267
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.267
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanhang Zheng, Zhixing Tan, Meng Zhang, Mieradilijiang Maimaiti, Huanbo Luan, Maosong Sun, Qun Liu, and Yang Liu. 2021. Self-Supervised Quality Estimation for Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3322–3334, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Self-Supervised Quality Estimation for Machine Translation (Zheng et al., EMNLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.267.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.267.mp4