STACC, OOV Density and N-gram Saturation: Vicomtech’s Participation in the WMT 2018 Shared Task on Parallel Corpus Filtering

Andoni Azpeitia, Thierry Etchegoyhen, Eva Martínez Garcia


Abstract
We describe Vicomtech’s participation in the WMT 2018 Shared Task on parallel corpus filtering. We aimed to evaluate a simple approach to the task, which can efficiently process large volumes of data and can be easily deployed for new datasets in different language pairs and domains. We based our approach on STACC, an efficient and portable method for parallel sentence identification in comparable corpora. To address the specifics of the corpus filtering task, which features significant volumes of noisy data, the core method was expanded with a penalty based on the amount of unknown words in sentence pairs. Additionally, we experimented with a complementary data saturation method based on source sentence n-grams, with the goal of demoting parallel sentence pairs that do not contribute significant amounts of yet unobserved n-grams. Our approach requires no prior training and is highly efficient on the type of large datasets featured in the corpus filtering task. We achieved competitive results with this simple and portable method, ranking in the top half among competing systems overall.
Anthology ID:
W18-6473
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Belgium, Brussels
Editors:
Ondřej Bojar, Rajen Chatterjee, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Yvette Graham, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz, Matteo Negri, Aurélie Névéol, Mariana Neves, Matt Post, Lucia Specia, Marco Turchi, Karin Verspoor
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
860–866
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6473
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-6473
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andoni Azpeitia, Thierry Etchegoyhen, and Eva Martínez Garcia. 2018. STACC, OOV Density and N-gram Saturation: Vicomtech’s Participation in the WMT 2018 Shared Task on Parallel Corpus Filtering. In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers, pages 860–866, Belgium, Brussels. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
STACC, OOV Density and N-gram Saturation: Vicomtech’s Participation in the WMT 2018 Shared Task on Parallel Corpus Filtering (Azpeitia et al., WMT 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6473.pdf