English

There's no Data Like Better Data: Using QE Metrics for MT Data Filtering

Computation and Language 2023-11-10 v1

Abstract

Quality Estimation (QE), the evaluation of machine translation output without the need of explicit references, has seen big improvements in the last years with the use of neural metrics. In this paper we analyze the viability of using QE metrics for filtering out bad quality sentence pairs in the training data of neural machine translation systems~(NMT). While most corpus filtering methods are focused on detecting noisy examples in collections of texts, usually huge amounts of web crawled data, QE models are trained to discriminate more fine-grained quality differences. We show that by selecting the highest quality sentence pairs in the training data, we can improve translation quality while reducing the training size by half. We also provide a detailed analysis of the filtering results, which highlights the differences between both approaches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.05350,
  title  = {There's no Data Like Better Data: Using QE Metrics for MT Data Filtering},
  author = {Jan-Thorsten Peter and David Vilar and Daniel Deutsch and Mara Finkelstein and Juraj Juraska and Markus Freitag},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.05350},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

to be published at WMT23

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:16:09.248Z