Lexical-constraint-aware neural machine translation via data augmentation

Abstract

Leveraging lexical constraint is extremely significant in domain-specific machine translation and interactive machine translation. Previous studies mainly focus on extending beam search algorithm or augmenting the training corpus by replacing source phrases with the corresponding target translation. These methods either suffer from the heavy computation cost during inference or depend on the quality of the bilingual dictionary pre-specified by the user or constructed with statistical machine translation. In response to these problems, we present a conceptually simple and empirically effective data augmentation approach in lexical constrained neural machine translation. Specifically, we construct constraint-aware training data by first randomly sampling the phrases of the reference as constraints, and then packing them together into the source sentence with a separation symbol. Extensive experiments on several language pairs demonstrate that our approach achieves superior translation results over the existing systems, improving translation of constrained sentences without hurting the unconstrained ones.