Dynamically Composing Domain-Data Selection with Clean-Data Selection by "Co-Curricular Learning" for Neural Machine Translation

Wei Wang
The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL2019)

Abstract

Noise and domain are important aspects of data quality for neural machine translation. Existing research focus separately on domain-data selection, clean-data selection, or their static combination, leaving the dynamic interaction across them not explicitly examined. This paper introduces a ``co-curricular learning'' method to compose dynamic domain-data selection with dynamic clean-data selection, for transfer learning across both capabilities. We apply an EM-style optimization procedure to further refine the ``co-curriculum''. Experiment results and analysis with two domains demonstrate the viability of the method and the properties of data scheduled by the co-curriculum.