English

Improving Lexically Constrained Neural Machine Translation with Source-Conditioned Masked Span Prediction

Computation and Language 2021-08-13 v3 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Accurate terminology translation is crucial for ensuring the practicality and reliability of neural machine translation (NMT) systems. To address this, lexically constrained NMT explores various methods to ensure pre-specified words and phrases appear in the translation output. However, in many cases, those methods are studied on general domain corpora, where the terms are mostly uni- and bi-grams (>98%). In this paper, we instead tackle a more challenging setup consisting of domain-specific corpora with much longer n-gram and highly specialized terms. Inspired by the recent success of masked span prediction models, we propose a simple and effective training strategy that achieves consistent improvements on both terminology and sentence-level translation for three domain-specific corpora in two language pairs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.05498,
  title  = {Improving Lexically Constrained Neural Machine Translation with Source-Conditioned Masked Span Prediction},
  author = {Gyubok Lee and Seongjun Yang and Edward Choi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.05498},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted at ACL 2021. Minor changes from the ACL camera-ready version

R2 v1 2026-06-24T02:01:41.009Z