Does more data always yield better translations
Guillem Gascó, Martha-Alicia Rocha, Germán Sanchis-Trilles, Jesús Andrés-Ferrer, Francisco Casacuberta · 2012
Nowadays, there are large amounts of data available to train statistical machine translation systems. However, it is not clear whether all the training data actually help or not. A system trained on a subset of such huge bilingual corpora might outperform the use of all the bilingual data. This paper studies such issues by analysing two training data selection techniques: one based on approximating the probability of an indomain corpus; and another based on infrequent n-gram occurrence. Experimental results not only report significant improvements over random sentence selection but also an improvement over a system trained with the whole available data. Surprisingly, the improvements are obtained with just a small fraction of the data that accounts for less than 0.5 % of the sentences. Afterwards, we show that a much larger room for improvement exists, although this is done under non-realistic conditions. 1