Learning to Actively Learn Neural Machine Translation

Ming Liu, Wray Buntine, Gholamreza Haffari


Abstract
Traditional active learning (AL) methods for machine translation (MT) rely on heuristics. However, these heuristics are limited when the characteristics of the MT problem change due to e.g. the language pair or the amount of the initial bitext. In this paper, we present a framework to learn sentence selection strategies for neural MT. We train the AL query strategy using a high-resource language-pair based on AL simulations, and then transfer it to the low-resource language-pair of interest. The learned query strategy capitalizes on the shared characteristics between the language pairs to make an effective use of the AL budget. Our experiments on three language-pairs confirms that our method is more effective than strong heuristic-based methods in various conditions, including cold-start and warm-start as well as small and extremely small data conditions.
Anthology ID:
K18-1033
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, Ivan Titov
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
334–344
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K18-1033
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K18-1033
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ming Liu, Wray Buntine, and Gholamreza Haffari. 2018. Learning to Actively Learn Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 334–344, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Actively Learn Neural Machine Translation (Liu et al., CoNLL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/K18-1033.pdf