Papers › Levenshtein Training for Word-level Quality Estimation

Levenshtein Training for Word-level Quality Estimation

12 Sep 2021EMNLP 2021 11arXiv:2109.05611archive 2025-07-28

Shuoyang Ding, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Matt Post, Philipp Koehn

We propose a novel scheme to use the Levenshtein Transformer to perform the task of word-level quality estimation. A Levenshtein Transformer is a natural fit for this task: trained to perform decoding in an iterative manner, a Levenshtein Transformer can learn to post-edit without explicit supervision. To further minimize the mismatch between the translation task and the word-level QE task, we propose a two-stage transfer learning procedure on both augmented data and human post-editing data. We also propose heuristics to construct reference labels that are compatible with subword-level finetuning and inference. Results on WMT 2020 QE shared task dataset show that our proposed method has superior data efficiency under the data-constrained setting and competitive performance under the unconstrained setting.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

shuoyangd/stenella officialmentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Transfer LearningTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLevenshtein TransformerLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections