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Conditional Bilingual Mutual Information Based Adaptive Training for Neural Machine Translation

Songming Zhang, Yijin Liu, Fandong Meng, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu, Jian Liu, Jie Zhou


Abstract
Token-level adaptive training approaches can alleviate the token imbalance problem and thus improve neural machine translation, through re-weighting the losses of different target tokens based on specific statistical metrics (e.g., token frequency or mutual information). Given that standard translation models make predictions on the condition of previous target contexts, we argue that the above statistical metrics ignore target context information and may assign inappropriate weights to target tokens. While one possible solution is to directly take target contexts into these statistical metrics, the target-context-aware statistical computing is extremely expensive, and the corresponding storage overhead is unrealistic. To solve the above issues, we propose a target-context-aware metric, named conditional bilingual mutual information (CBMI), which makes it feasible to supplement target context information for statistical metrics. Particularly, our CBMI can be formalized as the log quotient of the translation model probability and language model probability by decomposing the conditional joint distribution. Thus CBMI can be efficiently calculated during model training without any pre-specific statistical calculations and large storage overhead. Furthermore, we propose an effective adaptive training approach based on both the token- and sentence-level CBMI. Experimental results on WMT14 English-German and WMT19 Chinese-English tasks show our approach can significantly outperform the Transformer baseline and other related methods.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.169
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2377–2389
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.169
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.169
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Songming Zhang, Yijin Liu, Fandong Meng, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu, Jian Liu, and Jie Zhou. 2022. Conditional Bilingual Mutual Information Based Adaptive Training for Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2377–2389, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conditional Bilingual Mutual Information Based Adaptive Training for Neural Machine Translation (Zhang et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.169.pdf
Code
 songmzhang/cbmi