Semantically Consistent Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation via Conditional Masked Language Model

Qiao Cheng, Jin Huang, Yitao Duan


Abstract
This paper introduces a new data augmentation method for neural machine translation that can enforce stronger semantic consistency both within and across languages. Our method is based on Conditional Masked Language Model (CMLM) which is bi-directional and can be conditional on both left and right context, as well as the label. We demonstrate that CMLM is a good technique for generating context-dependent word distributions. In particular, we show that CMLM is capable of enforcing semantic consistency by conditioning on both source and target during substitution. In addition, to enhance diversity, we incorporate the idea of soft word substitution for data augmentation which replaces a word with a probabilistic distribution over the vocabulary. Experiments on four translation datasets of different scales show that the overall solution results in more realistic data augmentation and better translation quality. Our approach consistently achieves the best performance in comparison with strong and recent works and yields improvements of up to 1.90 BLEU points over the baseline.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.457
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5148–5157
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.457
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qiao Cheng, Jin Huang, and Yitao Duan. 2022. Semantically Consistent Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation via Conditional Masked Language Model. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 5148–5157, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Semantically Consistent Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation via Conditional Masked Language Model (Cheng et al., COLING 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.457.pdf
Code
 netease-youdao/cmlm_da