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arXiv · 1805.09119

Selecting Machine-Translated Data for Quick Bootstrapping of a Natural Language Understanding System

Judith Gaspers·Penny Karanasou·Rajen Chatterjee
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Abstract

This paper investigates the use of Machine Translation (MT) to bootstrap a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) system for a new language for the use case of a large-scale voice-controlled device. The goal is to decrease the cost and time needed to get an annotated corpus for the new language, while still having a large enough coverage of user requests. Different methods of filtering MT data in order to keep utterances that improve NLU performance and language-specific post-processing methods are investigated. These methods are tested in a large-scale NLU task with translating around 10 millions training utterances from English to German. The results show a large improvement for using MT data over a grammar-based and over an in-house data collection baseline, while reducing the manual effort greatly. Both filtering and post-processing approaches improve results further.

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Judith Gaspers, Penny Karanasou, Rajen Chatterjee. 2018-05-23. Selecting Machine-Translated Data for Quick Bootstrapping of a Natural Language Understanding System. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09119

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