The advantages of neural machine translation (NMT) have been extensively validated for offline translation of several language pairs for different domains of spoken and written language. However, research on interactive learning of NMT by adaptation to human post-edits has so far been confined to simulation experiments. We present the first user study on online adaptation of NMT to user post-edits in the domain of patent translation. Our study involves 29 human subjects (translation students) whose post-editing effort and translation quality were measured on about 4,500 interactions of a human post-editor and a machine translation system integrating an online adaptive learning algorithm. Our experimental results show a significant reduction of human post-editing effort due to online adaptation in NMT according to several evaluation metrics, including hTER, hBLEU, and KSMR. Furthermore, we found significant improvements in BLEU/TER between NMT outputs and professional translations in granted patents, providing further evidence for the advantages of online adaptive NMT in an interactive setup.
We present Otedama, a fast, open-source tool for rule-based syntactic pre-ordering, a well established technique in statistical machine translation. Otedama implements both a learner for pre-ordering rules, as well as a component for applying these rules to parsed sentences. Our system is compatible with several external parsers and capable of accommodating many source and all target languages in any machine translation paradigm which uses parallel training data. We demonstrate improvements on a patent translation task over a state-of-the-art English-Japanese hierarchical phrase-based machine translation system. We compare Otedama with an existing syntax-based pre-ordering system, showing comparable translation performance at a runtime speedup of a factor of 4.5-10.
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