Chunyou Li


2024

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A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Improve Low-Resource Machine Translation Leveraging Domain Monolingual Data
Hongxiao Zhang | Mingtong Liu | Chunyou Li | Yufeng Chen | Jinan Xu | Ming Zhou
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Due to the lack of parallel data, the mainstream fine-tuning-based domain adaptation methods have the overfitting problem in the translation of low-resource domains, and it is difficult for the model to learn the in-domain generalization knowledge. To address the above issue, in this work, we propose a novel Reinforcement Learning Domain Adaptation method for Neural Machine Translation (RLDA-NMT) in the low-resource domain. RLDA-NMT utilizes in-domain source monolingual data to make up for the lack of parallel data, and reinforces domain features learning to make the translation model learn the domain-specific knowledge more fully. Specifically, we first train a ranking-based model with a small-scale in-domain parallel corpus, and then adopt it as the reward model to select higher-quality generated translations for reinforcement when fine-tuning pre-trained NMT model using in-domain source monolingual data. We conduct experiments on Education, Laws, Thesis, and Patent domains of Chinese⇔English translation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that RLDA-NMT can alleviate overfitting and reinforce the NMT model to learn domain-specific knowledge. Additionally, the results also show that RLDA-NMT and back-translation (BT) are nicely complementary to each other, where combining RLDA-NMT with BT can further improve translation quality.

2023

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MT2: Towards a Multi-Task Machine Translation Model with Translation-Specific In-Context Learning
Chunyou Li | Mingtong Liu | Hongxiao Zhang | Yufeng Chen | Jinan Xu | Ming Zhou
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Sentence-level translation, document-level translation, translation memory, and terminology constrained translation play an important role in machine translation. Most of the previous work uses separate models or methods to solve these tasks, which is not conducive to knowledge transfer of different tasks and increases the complexity of system construction. In this work, we explore the potential of pre-trained language model in machine translation tasks and propose a Multi-Task Machine Translation (MT2) model to integrate these translation tasks. We design a novel translation-specific In-Context Learning (ICL) paradigm for model training, in which all of the translation tasks can be modeled as context-learning tasks that integrate contextual information for performance improvement. Specifically, we propose a retrieval and alignment method to obtain a large scale context-enhancement training data, then we train the model in an in-context learning manner. Furthermore, we adopt two context-dependent training strategies to encourage the model to better understand and utilize contextual information for translation. Extensive experiments on translation memory, terminology constrained translation, document-level translation, and few-shot domain-adaptation tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our model, verifying the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

2022

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BJTU-Toshiba’s Submission to WMT22 Quality Estimation Shared Task
Hui Huang | Hui Di | Chunyou Li | Hanming Wu | Kazushige Ouchi | Yufeng Chen | Jian Liu | Jinan Xu
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

This paper presents the BJTU-Toshiba joint submission for WMT 2022 quality estimation shared task. We only participate in Task 1 (quality prediction) of the shared task, focusing on the sentence-level MQM prediction. The techniques we experimented with include the integration of monolingual language models and the pre-finetuning of pre-trained representations. We tried two styles of pre-finetuning, namely Translation Language Modeling and Replaced Token Detection. We demonstrate the competitiveness of our system compared to the widely adopted XLM-RoBERTa baseline. Our system is also the top-ranking system on the Sentence-level MQM Prediction for the English-German language pairs.