Towards better Chinese-centric neural machine translation for low-resource languages

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed enormous improvements in science and technology, stimulating the growing demand for economic and cultural exchanges in various countries. Building a neural machine translation (NMT) system has become an urgent trend, especially in the low-resource setting. However, recent work tends to study NMT systems for low-resource languages centered on English, while a few studies focus on low-resource NMT systems centered on other languages such as Chinese. To achieve this, the low-resource multilingual translation challenge of the 2021 iFLYTEK AI Developer Competition provides the Chinese-centric multilingual low-resource NMT tasks, where participants are required to build NMT systems based on the provided low-resource samples. In this paper, we present the competition-winning system that leverages monolingual word embeddings data enhancement, bilingual curriculum learning, and contrastive re-ranking. In addition, a new Incomplete-Trust (In-trust) loss function is proposed to replace the traditional cross-entropy loss when training. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the implementation of these ideas leads to better performance than other state-of-the-art methods. All the experimental codes are released at: https://github.com/WENGSYX/Low-resource-text-translation.