Data selection for NMT using Infrequent n-gram Recovery

Abstract

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has achieved promising results comparable with Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PBSMT). However, to train a neural translation engine, much more powerful machines are required than those required to develop translation engines based on PBSMT. One solution to reduce the training cost of NMT systems is the reduction of the training corpus through data selection (DS) techniques. There are many DS techniques applied in PBSMT which bring good results. In this work, we show that the data selection technique based on infrequent n-gram occurrence described in (Gascó et al., 2012) commonly used for PBSMT systems also works well for NMT systems. We focus our work on selecting data according to specific corpora using the previously mentioned technique. The specific-domain corpora used for our experiments are IT domain and medical domain. The DS technique significantly reduces the execution time required to train the model between 87% and 93%. Also, it improves translation quality by up to 2.8 BLEU points. The improvements are obtained with just a small fraction of the data that accounts for between 6% and 20% of the total data.