Research

NLP

Facebook AI's WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission

October 31, 2019

Abstract

This paper describes Facebook AI's submission to the WAT 2019 Myanmar-English translation task. Our baseline systems are BPE-based transformer models. We explore methods to leverage monolingual data to improve generalization, including self-training, back-translation and their combination. We further improve results by using noisy channel re-ranking and ensembling. We demonstrate that these techniques can significantly improve not only a system trained with additional monolingual data, but even the baseline system trained exclusively on the provided small parallel dataset. Our system ranks first in both directions according to human evaluation and BLEU, with a gain of over 8 BLEU points above the second best system.

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AUTHORS

Written by

Peng-Jen Chen

Jiajun Shen

Matt Le

Vishrav Chaudhary

Ahmed El-Kishky

Guillaume Wenzek

Myle Ott

Marc’Aurelio Ranzato

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Facebook AI's WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission

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