Papers › A Simple and Effective Approach to Automatic Post-Editing with Transfer Learning

A Simple and Effective Approach to Automatic Post-Editing with Transfer Learning

1 Jul 2019ACL 2019 7archive 2025-07-28

Gon{\c{c}}alo M. Correia, Andr{\'e} F. T. Martins

Automatic post-editing (APE) seeks to automatically refine the output of a black-box machine translation (MT) system through human post-edits. APE systems are usually trained by complementing human post-edited data with large, artificial data generated through back-translations, a time-consuming process often no easier than training a MT system from scratch. in this paper, we propose an alternative where we fine-tune pre-trained BERT models on both the encoder and decoder of an APE system, exploring several parameter sharing strategies. By only training on a dataset of 23K sentences for 3 hours on a single GPU we obtain results that are competitive with systems that were trained on 5M artificial sentences. When we add this artificial data our method obtains state-of-the-art results.

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deep-spin/OpenNMT-APE officialmentioned in paperpytorchMIT report

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Automatic Post-EditingDecoderMachine TranslationTransfer LearningTranslation

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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