Improved English to Hindi Multimodal Neural Machine Translation

Abstract

Machine translation performs automatic translation from one natural language to another. Neural machine translation attains a state-of-the-art approach in machine translation, but it requires adequate training data, which is a severe problem for low-resource language pairs translation. The concept of multimodal is introduced in neural machine translation (NMT) by merging textual features with visual features to improve low-resource pair translation. WAT2021 (Workshop on Asian Translation 2021) organizes a shared task of multimodal translation for English to Hindi. We have participated the same with team name CNLP-NITS-PP in two submissions: multimodal and text-only translation. This work investigates phrase pairs injection via data augmentation approach and attains improvement over our previous work at WAT2020 on the same task in both text-only and multimodal translation. We have achieved second rank on the challenge test set for English to Hindi multimodal translation where Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score of 39.28, Rank-based Intuitive Bilingual Evaluation Score (RIBES) 0.792097, and Adequacy-Fluency Metrics (AMFM) score 0.830230 respectively.