Efficient Domain Adaptation for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation

WangJie You, Pei Guo, Juntao Li, Kehai Chen, Min Zhang


Abstract
Domain adaptation remains a challenge in the realm of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), even in the era of large language models (LLMs). Existing non-parametric approaches like nearest neighbor machine translation have made small Autoregressive Translation (AT) models achieve efficient domain generalization and adaptation without updating parameters, but leaving the Non-Autoregressive Translation (NAT) counterparts under-explored. To fill this blank, we introduce Bi-kNN, an innovative and efficient domain adaptation approach for NAT models that tailors a k-nearest-neighbor algorithm for NAT. Specifically, we introduce an effective datastore construction and correlated updating strategies to conform the parallel nature of NAT. Additionally, we train a meta-network that seamlessly integrates the NN distribution with the NMT distribution robustly during the iterative decoding process of NAT. Our experimental results across four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our Bi-kNN not only achieves significant improvements over the Base-NAT model (7.8 BLEU on average) but also exhibits enhanced efficiency.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.810
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13657–13670
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.810
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
WangJie You, Pei Guo, Juntao Li, Kehai Chen, and Min Zhang. 2024. Efficient Domain Adaptation for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 13657–13670, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Efficient Domain Adaptation for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation (You et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.810.pdf