The University of Maryland’s Kazakh-English Neural Machine Translation System at WMT19

Eleftheria Briakou, Marine Carpuat


Abstract
This paper describes the University of Maryland’s submission to the WMT 2019 Kazakh-English news translation task. We study the impact of transfer learning from another low-resource but related language. We experiment with different ways of encoding lexical units to maximize lexical overlap between the two language pairs, as well as back-translation and ensembling. The submitted system improves over a Kazakh-only baseline by +5.45 BLEU on newstest2019.
Anthology ID:
W19-5308
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Ondřej Bojar, Rajen Chatterjee, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Yvette Graham, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, André Martins, Christof Monz, Matteo Negri, Aurélie Névéol, Mariana Neves, Matt Post, Marco Turchi, Karin Verspoor
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
134–140
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-5308
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-5308
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eleftheria Briakou and Marine Carpuat. 2019. The University of Maryland’s Kazakh-English Neural Machine Translation System at WMT19. In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1), pages 134–140, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The University of Maryland’s Kazakh-English Neural Machine Translation System at WMT19 (Briakou & Carpuat, WMT 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-5308.pdf