Data Augmentation by Concatenation for Low-Resource Translation: A Mystery and a Solution

Toan Q. Nguyen, Kenton Murray, David Chiang

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the driving factors behind concatenation, a simple but effective data augmentation method for low-resource neural machine translation. Our experiments suggest that discourse context is unlikely the cause for concatenation improving BLEU by about +1 across four language pairs. Instead, we demonstrate that the improvement comes from three other factors unrelated to discourse: context diversity, length diversity, and (to a lesser extent) position shifting.