Learning to translate with products of novices: a suite of open-ended challenge problems for teaching MT

Abstract

Machine translation (MT) draws from several different disciplines, making it a complex subject to teach. There are excellent pedagogical texts, but problems in MT and current algorithms for solving them are best learned by doing. As a centerpiece of our MT course, we devised a series of open-ended challenges for students in which the goal was to improve performance on carefully constrained instances of four key MT tasks: alignment, decoding, evaluation, and reranking. Students brought a diverse set of techniques to the problems, including some novel solutions which performed remarkably well. A surprising and exciting outcome was that student solutions or their combinations fared competitively on some tasks, demonstrating that even newcomers to the field can help improve the state-of-the-art on hard NLP problems while simultaneously learning a great deal. The problems, baseline code, and results are freely available.

The Machine Translation Leaderboard

“…Some students used the leaderboard grader for a large number of experiments, which they then reported in writeups. For further information on how we incorporated the leaderboard into our class, empirical results, and student responses, see Lopez et al (2013).…”

Hunter MT: A Course for Young Researchers in WMT17

“…There has been an increasing amount of related courses introduced. However, hands-on experience is of vital importance to novices (Lopez et al, 2013).…”