Score Combination for Improved Parallel Corpus Filtering for Low Resource Conditions

This paper describes our submission to the WMT20 sentence filtering task. We combine scores from (1) a custom LASER built for each source language, (2) a classifier built to distinguish positive and negative pairs by semantic alignment, and (3) the original scores included in the task devkit. For the mBART finetuning setup, provided by the organizers, our method shows 7% and 5% relative improvement over baseline, in sacreBLEU score on the test set for Pashto and Khmer respectively.

Synthetic Data for Neural Machine Translation of Spoken-Dialects

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to generate synthetic data for training Neural Machine Translation systems. The proposed approach transforms a given parallel corpus between a written language and a target language to a parallel corpus between a spoken dialect variant and the target language. Our approach is language independent and can be used to generate data for any variant of the source language such as slang or spoken dialect or even for a different language that is closely related to the source language. The proposed approach is based on local embedding projection of distributed representations which utilizes monolingual embeddings to transform parallel data across language variants. We report experimental results on Levantine to English translation using Neural Machine Translation. We show that the generated data can improve a very large scale system by more than 2.8 Bleu points using synthetic spoken data which shows that it can be used to provide a reliable translation system for a spoken dialect that does not have sufficient parallel data.