Submodularity for Data Selection in Statistical Machine Translation
Katrin Kirchhoff, Jeff Bilmes · 2014
We introduce submodular optimization to the problem of training data subset selection for statistical machine translation (SMT). By explicitly formulating data selection as a submodular program, we ob-tain fast scalable selection algorithms with mathematical performance guarantees, re-sulting in a unified framework that clarifies existing approaches and also makes both new and many previous approaches easily accessible. We present a new class of submodular functions designed specifically for SMT and evaluate them on two differ-ent translation tasks. Our results show that our best submodular method significantly outperforms several baseline methods, including the widely-used cross-entropy based data selection method. In addition, our approach easily scales to large data sets and is applicable to other data selection problems in natural language processing. 1