Extreme Adaptation for Personalized Neural Machine Translation

Paul Michel; Graham Neubig

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arXiv · 1805.01817

Extreme Adaptation for Personalized Neural Machine Translation

Paul Michel·Graham Neubig

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Abstract

Every person speaks or writes their own flavor of their native language, influenced by a number of factors: the content they tend to talk about, their gender, their social status, or their geographical origin. When attempting to perform Machine Translation (MT), these variations have a significant effect on how the system should perform translation, but this is not captured well by standard one-size-fits-all models. In this paper, we propose a simple and parameter-efficient adaptation technique that only requires adapting the bias of the output softmax to each particular user of the MT system, either directly or through a factored approximation. Experiments on TED talks in three languages demonstrate improvements in translation accuracy, and better reflection of speaker traits in the target text.

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Paul Michel, Graham Neubig. 2018-05-04. Extreme Adaptation for Personalized Neural Machine Translation. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.01817

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