Semi-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Translation Adaptation with Tiny Amount of In-domain Data

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method which uses semi-supervised convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to select in-domain training data for statistical machine translation. This approach is particularly effective when only tiny amounts of in-domain data are available. The in-domain data and randomly sampled general-domain data are used to train a data selection model with semi-supervised CNN, then this model computes domain relevance scores for all the sentences in the general domain dataset. The sentence pairs with top scores are selected to train the system. We carry out experiments on 4 language directions with three test domains. Compared with strong baseline systems trained with large amount of data, this method can improve the performance up to 3.1 BLEU. Its performances are significant better than three state-of-the-art language model based data selection methods. We also show that the in-domain data used to train the selection model could be as few as 100 sentences, which makes fine grained topic-dependent translation adaptation possible.