Target Conditioned Sampling: Optimizing Data Selection for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Xinyi Wang, Graham Neubig · 2019
To improve low-resource Neural Machine Translation (NMT) with multilingual corpora, training on the most related high-resource language only is often more effective than using all data available (Neubig and Hu, 2018).However, it is possible that an intelligent data selection strategy can further improve lowresource NMT with data from other auxiliary languages.In this paper, we seek to construct a sampling distribution over all multilingual data, so that it minimizes the training loss of the low-resource language.Based on this formulation, we propose an efficient algorithm, Target Conditioned Sampling (TCS), which first samples a target sentence, and then conditionally samples its source sentence.Experiments show that TCS brings significant gains of up to 2 BLEU on three of four languages we test, with minimal training overhead 1 .