Lingua custodia at WMT'19: Attempts to control terminology

Abstract

This paper describes Lingua Custodia's submission to the WMT'19 news shared task for German-to-French on the topic of the EU elections. We report experiments on the adaptation of the terminology of a machine translation system to a specific topic, aimed at providing more accurate translations of specific entities like political parties and person names, given that the shared task provided no in-domain training parallel data dealing with the restricted topic. Our primary submission to the shared task uses backtranslation generated with a type of decoding allowing the insertion of constraints in the output in order to guarantee the correct translation of specific terms that are not necessarily observed in the data.