Translation Memory Guided Neural Machine Translation

Shaohui Kuang, Heng Yu, Weihua Luo, Qiang Wang

Keywords: neural machine translation, translation memory, pre-train language model

Abstract:

Many studies have proven that Translation Memory (TM) can help improve the translation quality of neural machine translation (NMT). Existing ways either employ extra encoder to encode information from TM or concatenate source sentence and TM sentences as encoder's input. These previous methods don't model the semantic relationship between the source sentence and TM sentences. Meanwhile, the training corpus related to TM is limited, and the sentence level retrieval approach further limits its scale.
In this paper, we propose a novel method to combine the strengths of both TM and NMT. We treat the matched sentence pair of TM as the additional signal and apply one encoder enhanced by the pre-trained language model (PLM) to encode the TM information and source sentence together. Additionally, we extend the sentence level retrieval method to the n-gram retrieval method that we don't need to calculate the similarity score. Further, we explore new methods to manipulate the information flow from TM to the NMT decoder. We validate our proposed methods on a mixed test set of multiple domains. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed methods can significantly improve the translation quality and show strong adaptation for an unknown or new domain.

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