A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Improve Low-Resource Machine Translation Leveraging Domain Monolingual Data

Abstract

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.