To Label or Not to Label: Hybrid Active Learning for Neural Machine Translation

Abdul Hameed Azeemi, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Agha Ali Raza


Abstract
Active learning (AL) techniques reduce labeling costs for training neural machine translation (NMT) models by selecting smaller representative subsets from unlabeled data for annotation. Diversity sampling techniques select heterogeneous instances, while uncertainty sampling methods select instances with the highest model uncertainty. Both approaches have limitations - diversity methods may extract varied but trivial examples, while uncertainty sampling can yield repetitive, uninformative instances. To bridge this gap, we propose Hybrid Uncertainty and Diversity Sampling (HUDS), an AL strategy for domain adaptation in NMT that combines uncertainty and diversity for sentence selection. HUDS computes uncertainty scores for unlabeled sentences and subsequently stratifies them. It then clusters sentence embeddings within each stratum and computes diversity scores by distance to the centroid. A weighted hybrid score that combines uncertainty and diversity is then used to select the top instances for annotation in each AL iteration. Experiments on multi-domain German-English and French-English datasets demonstrate the better performance of HUDS over other strong AL baselines. We analyze the sentence selection with HUDS and show that it prioritizes diverse instances having high model uncertainty for annotation in early AL iterations.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.206
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3071–3082
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.206/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abdul Hameed Azeemi, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, and Agha Ali Raza. 2025. To Label or Not to Label: Hybrid Active Learning for Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3071–3082, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
To Label or Not to Label: Hybrid Active Learning for Neural Machine Translation (Azeemi et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.206.pdf