On Synthetic Data for Back Translation

Jiahao Xu, Yubin Ruan, Wei Bi, Guoping Huang, Shuming Shi, Lihui Chen, Lemao Liu


Abstract
Back translation (BT) is one of the most significant technologies in NMT research fields. Existing attempts on BT share a common characteristic: they employ either beam search or random sampling to generate synthetic data with a backward model but seldom work studies the role of synthetic data in the performance of BT. This motivates us to ask a fundamental question: what kind of synthetic data contributes to BT performance?Through both theoretical and empirical studies, we identify two key factors on synthetic data controlling the back-translation NMT performance, which are quality and importance. Furthermore, based on our findings, we propose a simple yet effective method to generate synthetic data to better trade off both factors so as to yield the better performance for BT. We run extensive experiments on WMT14 DE-EN, EN-DE, and RU-EN benchmark tasks. By employing our proposed method to generate synthetic data, our BT model significantly outperforms the standard BT baselines (i.e., beam and sampling based methods for data generation), which proves the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.32
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
419–430
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.32
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.32
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiahao Xu, Yubin Ruan, Wei Bi, Guoping Huang, Shuming Shi, Lihui Chen, and Lemao Liu. 2022. On Synthetic Data for Back Translation. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 419–430, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On Synthetic Data for Back Translation (Xu et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.32.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.32.mp4
Code
 jiahao004/data-for-bt