Creating the best development corpus for Statistical Machine Translation systems

Abstract

We propose and study three different novel approaches for tackling the problem of development set selection in Statistical Machine Translation. We focus on a scenario where a machine translation system is leveraged for translating a specific test set, without further data from the domain at hand. Such test set stems from a real application of machine translation, where the texts of a specific e-commerce were to be translated. For developing our development-set selection techniques, we first conducted experiments in a controlled scenario, where labelled data from different domains was available, and evaluated the techniques both with classification and translation quality metrics. Then, the best-performing techniques were evaluated on the e-commerce data at hand, yielding consistent improvements across two language directions.