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Separating Grains from the Chaff: Using Data Filtering to Improve Multilingual Translation for Low-Resourced African Languages

2022/10/19 by Idris Abdulmumin, Abdulmumin, Idris, Michael Beukman +19 · 3 citations
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Text Readability and Simplification #Topic Modeling

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2210.10692

openalex publication_date 2022/10/19 · openalex created_date 2022/10/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We participated in the WMT 2022 Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for the African Languages Shared Task. This work describes our approach, which is based on filtering the given noisy data using a sentence-pair classifier that was built by fine-tuning a pre-trained language model. To train the classifier, we obtain positive samples (i.e. high-quality parallel sentences) from a gold-standard curated dataset and extract negative samples (i.e. low-quality parallel sentences) from automatically aligned parallel data by choosing sentences with low alignment scores. Our final machine translation model was then trained on filtered data, instead of the entire noisy dataset. We empirically validate our approach by evaluating on two common datasets and show that data filtering generally improves overall translation quality, in some cases even significantly.

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