NJU submissions for the WMT19 quality estimation shared task

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the submissions of the team from Nanjing University for the WMT19 sentence-level Quality Estimation (QE) shared task on English-German language pair. We develop two approaches based on a two-stage neural QE model consisting of a feature extractor and a quality estimator. More specifically, one of the proposed approaches employs the translation knowledge between the two languages from two different translation directions; while the other one employs extra monolingual knowledge from both source and target sides, obtained by pre-training deep self-attention networks. To efficiently train these two-stage models, a joint learning training method is applied. Experiments show that the ensemble model of the above two models achieves the best results on the benchmark dataset of the WMT17 sentence-level QE shared task and obtains competitive results in WMT19, ranking 3rd out of 10 submissions.