Keywords: meta learning, machine translation, back translation
Abstract: Back-translation is an effective strategy to improve the performance of Neural Machine Translation~(NMT) by generating pseudo-parallel data. However, several recent works have found that better translation quality in the pseudo-parallel data does not necessarily lead to a better final translation model, while lower-quality but diverse data often yields stronger results instead.
In this paper we propose a new way to generate pseudo-parallel data for back-translation that directly optimizes the final model performance. Specifically, we propose a meta-learning framework where the back-translation model learns to match the forward-translation model's gradients on the development data with those on the pseudo-parallel data. In our evaluations in both the standard datasets WMT En-De'14 and WMT En-Fr'14, as well as a multilingual translation setting, our method leads to significant improvements over strong baselines.
One-sentence Summary: Use meta learning to teach the back-translation model to generate better back-translated sentences.
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Code: [![github](/images/github_icon.svg) google-research/google-research](https://github.com/google-research/google-research)
Community Implementations: [![CatalyzeX](/images/catalyzex_icon.svg) 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2102.07847/code)
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