In plain words: When two languages put words in very different orders, the model learns from extra practice sentences rearranged to match the source language's order. This beat the usual trick of translating text backward to make fake practice data on low-resource Japanese- and Uyghur-to-English translation.
Abstract · Handling Syntactic Divergence in Low-resource Machine Translation
Despite impressive empirical successes of neural machine translation (NMT) on standard benchmarks, limited parallel data impedes the application of NMT models to many language pairs. Data augmentation methods such as back-translation make it possible to use monolingual data to help alleviate these issues, but back-translation itself fails in extreme low-resource scenarios, especially for syntactically divergent languages. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective solution, whereby target-language sentences are re-ordered to match the order of the source and used as an additional source of training-time supervision. Experiments with simulated low-resource Japanese-to-English, and real low-resource Uyghur-to-English scenarios find significant improvements over other semi-supervised alternatives.
Chunting Zhou, Xuezhe Ma, Junjie Hu, Graham Neubig
arXiv:1909.00040 · cs.CL · submitted Aug 30, 2019
abstract · pdf · Accepted by EMNLP 2019 (short paper)