Accurate semantic textual similarity for cleaning noisy parallel corpora using semantic machine translation evaluation metric: The NRC supervised submissions to the Parallel Corpus Filtering task

Chi-kiu Lo, Michel Simard, Darlene Stewart, Samuel Larkin, Cyril Goutte, Patrick Littell


Abstract
We present our semantic textual similarity approach in filtering a noisy web crawled parallel corpus using YiSi—a novel semantic machine translation evaluation metric. The systems mainly based on this supervised approach perform well in the WMT18 Parallel Corpus Filtering shared task (4th place in 100-million-word evaluation, 8th place in 10-million-word evaluation, and 6th place overall, out of 48 submissions). In fact, our best performing system—NRC-yisi-bicov is one of the only four submissions ranked top 10 in both evaluations. Our submitted systems also include some initial filtering steps for scaling down the size of the test corpus and a final redundancy removal step for better semantic and token coverage of the filtered corpus. In this paper, we also describe our unsuccessful attempt in automatically synthesizing a noisy parallel development corpus for tuning the weights to combine different parallelism and fluency features.
Anthology ID:
W18-6481
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:
908–916
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6481
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-6481
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chi-kiu Lo, Michel Simard, Darlene Stewart, Samuel Larkin, Cyril Goutte, and Patrick Littell. 2018. Accurate semantic textual similarity for cleaning noisy parallel corpora using semantic machine translation evaluation metric: The NRC supervised submissions to the Parallel Corpus Filtering task. In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers, pages 908–916, Belgium, Brussels. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Accurate semantic textual similarity for cleaning noisy parallel corpora using semantic machine translation evaluation metric: The NRC supervised submissions to the Parallel Corpus Filtering task (Lo et al., WMT 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6481.pdf