DEEP: DEnoising Entity Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation

Junjie Hu, Hiroaki Hayashi, Kyunghyun Cho, Graham Neubig

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

It has been shown that machine translation models usually generate poor translations for named entities that are infrequent in the training corpus. Earlier named entity translation methods mainly focus on phonetic transliteration, which ignores the sentence context for translation and is limited in domain and language coverage. To address this limitation, we propose DEEP, a DEnoising Entity Pretraining method that leverages large amounts of monolingual data and a knowledge base to improve named entity translation accuracy within sentences. Besides, we investigate a multi-task learning strategy that finetunes a pre-trained neural machine translation model on both entity-augmented monolingual data and parallel data to further improve entity translation. Experimental results on three language pairs demonstrate that DEEP results in significant improvements over strong denoising auto-encoding baselines, with a gain of up to 1.3 BLEU and up to 9.2 entity accuracy points for English-Russian translation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationACL 2022 - 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
EditorsSmaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1753-1766
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917216
StatePublished - 2022
Event60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2022 - Dublin, Ireland
Duration: May 22 2022May 27 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume1
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

Conference60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2022
Country/TerritoryIreland
CityDublin
Period5/22/225/27/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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