Pronoun-Targeted Fine-tuning for NMT with Hybrid Losses

Prathyusha Jwalapuram; Shafiq Joty; Youlin Shen

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arXiv · 2010.07638

Pronoun-Targeted Fine-tuning for NMT with Hybrid Losses

Prathyusha Jwalapuram·Shafiq Joty·Youlin Shen

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Abstract

Popular Neural Machine Translation model training uses strategies like backtranslation to improve BLEU scores, requiring large amounts of additional data and training. We introduce a class of conditional generative-discriminative hybrid losses that we use to fine-tune a trained machine translation model. Through a combination of targeted fine-tuning objectives and intuitive re-use of the training data the model has failed to adequately learn from, we improve the model performance of both a sentence-level and a contextual model without using any additional data. We target the improvement of pronoun translations through our fine-tuning and evaluate our models on a pronoun benchmark testset. Our sentence-level model shows a 0.5 BLEU improvement on both the WMT14 and the IWSLT13 De-En testsets, while our contextual model achieves the best results, improving from 31.81 to 32 BLEU on WMT14 De-En testset, and from 32.10 to 33.13 on the IWSLT13 De-En testset, with corresponding improvements in pronoun translation. We further show the generalizability of our method by reproducing the improvements on two additional language pairs, Fr-En and Cs-En. Code available at .

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Prathyusha Jwalapuram, Shafiq Joty, Youlin Shen. 2020-10-15. Pronoun-Targeted Fine-tuning for NMT with Hybrid Losses. https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.07638

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