Boosting Neural Machine Translation with Similar Translations

Abstract

This paper explores data augmentation methods for training Neural Machine Translation to make use of similar translations, in a comparable way a human translator employs fuzzy matches. In particular, we show how we can simply feed the neural model with information on both source and target sides of the fuzzy matches, we also extend the similarity to include semantically related translations retrieved using distributed sentence representations. We show that translations based on fuzzy matching provide the model with "copy" information while translations based on embedding similarities tend to extend the translation "context". Results indicate that the effect from both similar sentences are adding up to further boost accuracy, are combining naturally with model fine-tuning and are providing dynamic adaptation for unseen translation pairs. Tests on multiple data sets and domains show consistent accuracy improvements. To foster research around these techniques, we also release an Open-Source toolkit with efficient and flexible fuzzy-match implementation.