Extremely Low-Resource Text Simplification with Pre-trained Transformer Language Model

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (01) ◽  
pp. 2050001
Author(s):  
Takumi Maruyama ◽  
Kazuhide Yamamoto
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Language Model ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Resource Setting ◽  
Text Simplification ◽  
Low Resource Setting

Inspired by machine translation task, recent text simplification approaches regard a task as a monolingual text-to-text generation, and neural machine translation models have significantly improved the performance of simplification tasks. Although such models require a large-scale parallel corpus, such corpora for text simplification are very few in number and smaller in size compared to machine translation task. Therefore, we have attempted to facilitate the training of simplification rewritings using pre-training from a large-scale monolingual corpus such as Wikipedia articles. In addition, we propose a translation language model to seamlessly conduct a fine-tuning of text simplification from the pre-training of the language model. The experimental results show that the translation language model substantially outperforms a state-of-the-art model under a low-resource setting. In addition, a pre-trained translation language model with only 3000 supervised examples can achieve a performance comparable to that of the state-of-the-art model using 30,000 supervised examples.

scholarly journals A Survey on Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui Wang ◽  
Xu Tan ◽  
Renqian Luo ◽  
Tao Qin ◽  
Tie-Yan Liu
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Modal Data ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Resource Setting ◽  
Low Resource Setting ◽  
Parallel Data ◽  
Target Languages

Neural approaches have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on machine translation but suffer from the high cost of collecting large scale parallel data. Thus, a lot of research has been conducted for neural machine translation (NMT) with very limited parallel data, i.e., the low-resource setting. In this paper, we provide a survey for low-resource NMT and classify related works into three categories according to the auxiliary data they used: (1) exploiting monolingual data of source and/or target languages, (2) exploiting data from auxiliary languages, and (3) exploiting multi-modal data. We hope that our survey can help researchers to better understand this field and inspire them to design better algorithms, and help industry practitioners to choose appropriate algorithms for their applications.

Analyzing Subword Techniques to Improve English to Sinhala Neural Machine Translation

2021 ◽  
pp. 2050017
Author(s):  
Rashmini Naranpanawa ◽  
Ravinga Perera ◽  
Thilakshi Fonseka ◽  
Uthayasanker Thayasivam
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Translation System ◽  
Rare Word ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Morphologically Rich Languages

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a remarkable approach which performs much better than the Statistical machine translation (SMT) models when there is an abundance of parallel corpus. However, vanilla NMT is primarily based upon word-level with a fixed vocabulary. Therefore, low resource morphologically rich languages such as Sinhala are mostly affected by the out of vocabulary (OOV) and Rare word problems. Recent advancements in subword techniques have opened up opportunities for low resource communities by enabling open vocabulary translation. In this paper, we extend our recently published state-of-the-art EN-SI translation system using the transformer and explore standard subword techniques on top of it to identify which subword approach has a greater effect on English Sinhala language pair. Our models demonstrate that subword segmentation strategies along with the state-of-the-art NMT can perform remarkably when translating English sentences into a rich morphology language regardless of a large parallel corpus.

scholarly journals A Joint Back-Translation and Transfer Learning Method for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Gong-Xu Luo ◽  
Ya-Ting Yang ◽  
Rui Dong ◽  
Yan-Hong Chen ◽  
Wen-Bo Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Transfer Learning ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Data Augmentation ◽  
Training Methods ◽  
Learning Method ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Parallel Data ◽  
Back Translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) for low-resource languages has drawn great attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose a joint back-translation and transfer learning method for low-resource languages. It is widely recognized that data augmentation methods and transfer learning methods are both straight forward and effective ways for low-resource problems. However, existing methods, which utilize one of these methods alone, limit the capacity of NMT models for low-resource problems. In order to make full use of the advantages of existing methods and further improve the translation performance of low-resource languages, we propose a new method to perfectly integrate the back-translation method with mainstream transfer learning architectures, which can not only initialize the NMT model by transferring parameters of the pretrained models, but also generate synthetic parallel data by translating large-scale monolingual data of the target side to boost the fluency of translations. We conduct experiments to explore the effectiveness of the joint method by incorporating back-translation into the parent-child and the hierarchical transfer learning architecture. In addition, different preprocessing and training methods are explored to get better performance. Experimental results on Uygur-Chinese and Turkish-English translation demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the baselines that use single methods.

scholarly journals Synchronous Bidirectional Neural Machine Translation

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 91-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Long Zhou ◽  
Jiajun Zhang ◽  
Chengqing Zong
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Single Model ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
German Translation ◽  
Transformer Model ◽  
Target Side ◽  
Future Information

Existing approaches to neural machine translation (NMT) generate the target language sequence token-by-token from left to right. However, this kind of unidirectional decoding framework cannot make full use of the target-side future contexts which can be produced in a right-to-left decoding direction, and thus suffers from the issue of unbalanced outputs. In this paper, we introduce a synchronous bidirectional–neural machine translation (SB-NMT) that predicts its outputs using left-to-right and right-to-left decoding simultaneously and interactively, in order to leverage both of the history and future information at the same time. Specifically, we first propose a new algorithm that enables synchronous bidirectional decoding in a single model. Then, we present an interactive decoding model in which left-to-right (right-to-left) generation does not only depend on its previously generated outputs, but also relies on future contexts predicted by right-to-left (left-to-right) decoding. We extensively evaluate the proposed SB-NMT model on large-scale NIST Chinese-English, WMT14 English-German, and WMT18 Russian-English translation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves significant improvements over the strong Transformer model by 3.92, 1.49, and 1.04 BLEU points, respectively, and obtains the state-of-the-art per- formance on Chinese-English and English- German translation tasks. 1

Neural machine translation of low-resource languages using SMT phrase pair injection

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Sukanta Sen ◽  
Mohammed Hasanuzzaman ◽  
Asif Ekbal ◽  
Pushpak Bhattacharyya ◽  
Andy Way
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Production Systems ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Original Training ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Better Than

Abstract Neural machine translation (NMT) has recently shown promising results on publicly available benchmark datasets and is being rapidly adopted in various production systems. However, it requires high-quality large-scale parallel corpus, and it is not always possible to have sufficiently large corpus as it requires time, money, and professionals. Hence, many existing large-scale parallel corpus are limited to the specific languages and domains. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to improve an NMT system in low-resource scenario without using any additional data. Our approach aims at augmenting the original training data by means of parallel phrases extracted from the original training data itself using a statistical machine translation (SMT) system. Our proposed approach is based on the gated recurrent unit (GRU) and transformer networks. We choose the Hindi–English, Hindi–Bengali datasets for Health, Tourism, and Judicial (only for Hindi–English) domains. We train our NMT models for 10 translation directions, each using only 5–23k parallel sentences. Experiments show the improvements in the range of 1.38–15.36 BiLingual Evaluation Understudy points over the baseline systems. Experiments show that transformer models perform better than GRU models in low-resource scenarios. In addition to that, we also find that our proposed method outperforms SMT—which is known to work better than the neural models in low-resource scenarios—for some translation directions. In order to further show the effectiveness of our proposed model, we also employ our approach to another interesting NMT task, for example, old-to-modern English translation, using a tiny parallel corpus of only 2.7K sentences. For this task, we use publicly available old-modern English text which is approximately 1000 years old. Evaluation for this task shows significant improvement over the baseline NMT.

scholarly journals Polygon-Net: A General Framework for Jointly Boosting Multiple Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation Models

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chang Xu ◽  
Tao Qin ◽  
Gang Wang ◽  
Tie-Yan Liu
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Loss Function ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Parallel Data ◽  
Benchmark Datasets ◽  
First Time

Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved great success. However, collecting large-scale parallel data for training is costly and laborious.  Recently, unsupervised neural machine translation has attracted more and more attention, due to its demand for monolingual corpus only, which is common and easy to obtain, and its great potentials for the low-resource or even zero-resource machine translation. In this work, we propose a general framework called Polygon-Net, which leverages multi auxiliary languages for jointly boosting unsupervised neural machine translation models. Specifically, we design a novel loss function for multi-language unsupervised neural machine translation. In addition, different from the literature that just updating one or two models individually, Polygon-Net enables multiple unsupervised models in the framework to update in turn and enhance each other for the first time. In this way, multiple unsupervised translation models are associated with each other for training to achieve better performance. Experiments on the benchmark datasets including UN Corpus and WMT show that our approach significantly improves over the two-language based methods, and achieves better performance with more languages introduced to the framework. 

scholarly journals Acquiring Knowledge from Pre-Trained Model to Neural Machine Translation

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 9266-9273
Author(s):  
Rongxiang Weng ◽  
Heng Yu ◽  
Shujian Huang ◽  
Shanbo Cheng ◽  
Weihua Luo
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Training Process ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Language Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Distillation ◽  
Training Objective ◽  
Natural Language Process

Pre-training and fine-tuning have achieved great success in natural language process field. The standard paradigm of exploiting them includes two steps: first, pre-training a model, e.g. BERT, with a large scale unlabeled monolingual data. Then, fine-tuning the pre-trained model with labeled data from downstream tasks. However, in neural machine translation (NMT), we address the problem that the training objective of the bilingual task is far different from the monolingual pre-trained model. This gap leads that only using fine-tuning in NMT can not fully utilize prior language knowledge. In this paper, we propose an Apt framework for acquiring knowledge from pre-trained model to NMT. The proposed approach includes two modules: 1). a dynamic fusion mechanism to fuse task-specific features adapted from general knowledge into NMT network, 2). a knowledge distillation paradigm to learn language knowledge continuously during the NMT training process. The proposed approach could integrate suitable knowledge from pre-trained models to improve the NMT. Experimental results on WMT English to German, German to English and Chinese to English machine translation tasks show that our model outperforms strong baselines and the fine-tuning counterparts.

TransBERT

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Zhongyang Li ◽  
Xiao Ding ◽  
Ting Liu
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Language Model ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Action Prediction ◽  
Target Task ◽  
Language Knowledge ◽  
Previous State ◽  
Transfer Tasks

Recent advances, such as GPT, BERT, and RoBERTa, have shown success in incorporating a pre-trained transformer language model and fine-tuning operations to improve downstream NLP systems. However, this framework still has some fundamental problems in effectively incorporating supervised knowledge from other related tasks. In this study, we investigate a transferable BERT (TransBERT) training framework, which can transfer not only general language knowledge from large-scale unlabeled data but also specific kinds of knowledge from various semantically related supervised tasks, for a target task. Particularly, we propose utilizing three kinds of transfer tasks, including natural language inference, sentiment classification, and next action prediction, to further train BERT based on a pre-trained model. This enables the model to get a better initialization for the target task. We take story-ending prediction as the target task to conduct experiments. The final results of 96.0% and 95.0% accuracy on two versions of Story Cloze Test datasets dramatically outperform previous state-of-the-art baseline methods. Several comparative experiments give some helpful suggestions on how to select transfer tasks to improve BERT. Furthermore, experiments on six English and three Chinese datasets show that TransBERT generalizes well to other tasks, languages, and pre-trained models.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document