Margin-based Parallel Corpus Mining with Multilingual Sentence Embeddings

Mikel Artetxe, Holger Schwenk


Abstract
Machine translation is highly sensitive to the size and quality of the training data, which has led to an increasing interest in collecting and filtering large parallel corpora. In this paper, we propose a new method for this task based on multilingual sentence embeddings. In contrast to previous approaches, which rely on nearest neighbor retrieval with a hard threshold over cosine similarity, our proposed method accounts for the scale inconsistencies of this measure, considering the margin between a given sentence pair and its closest candidates instead. Our experiments show large improvements over existing methods. We outperform the best published results on the BUCC mining task and the UN reconstruction task by more than 10 F1 and 30 precision points, respectively. Filtering the English-German ParaCrawl corpus with our approach, we obtain 31.2 BLEU points on newstest2014, an improvement of more than one point over the best official filtered version.
Anthology ID:
P19-1309
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3197–3203
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1309
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1309
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mikel Artetxe and Holger Schwenk. 2019. Margin-based Parallel Corpus Mining with Multilingual Sentence Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3197–3203, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Margin-based Parallel Corpus Mining with Multilingual Sentence Embeddings (Artetxe & Schwenk, ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1309.pdf
Code
 facebookresearch/LASER +  additional community code
Data
BUCC