Understanding Data Augmentation in Neural Machine Translation: Two Perspectives towards Generalization

Guanlin Li, Lemao Liu, Guoping Huang, Conghui Zhu, Tiejun Zhao


Abstract
Many Data Augmentation (DA) methods have been proposed for neural machine translation. Existing works measure the superiority of DA methods in terms of their performance on a specific test set, but we find that some DA methods do not exhibit consistent improvements across translation tasks. Based on the observation, this paper makes an initial attempt to answer a fundamental question: what benefits, which are consistent across different methods and tasks, does DA in general obtain? Inspired by recent theoretic advances in deep learning, the paper understands DA from two perspectives towards the generalization ability of a model: input sensitivity and prediction margin, which are defined independent of specific test set thereby may lead to findings with relatively low variance. Extensive experiments show that relatively consistent benefits across five DA methods and four translation tasks are achieved regarding both perspectives.
Anthology ID:
D19-1570
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5689–5695
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1570
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1570
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guanlin Li, Lemao Liu, Guoping Huang, Conghui Zhu, and Tiejun Zhao. 2019. Understanding Data Augmentation in Neural Machine Translation: Two Perspectives towards Generalization. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 5689–5695, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Understanding Data Augmentation in Neural Machine Translation: Two Perspectives towards Generalization (Li et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1570.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1570.Attachment.pdf