NICT's participation to WAT 2019: Multilingualism and Multi-step Fine-Tuning for Low Resource NMT

Abstract

In this paper we describe our submissions to WAT 2019 for the following tasks: English--Tamil translation and Russian--Japanese translation. Our team,``NICT-5'', focused on multilingual domain adaptation and back-translation for Russian--Japanese translation and on simple fine-tuning for English--Tamil translation . We noted that multi-stage fine tuning is essential in leveraging the power of multilingualism for an extremely low-resource language like Russian--Japanese. Furthermore, we can improve the performance of such a low-resource language pair by exploiting a small but in-domain monolingual corpus via back-translation. We managed to obtain second rank in both tasks for all translation directions.

Tasks

Reproductions