Proactive Learning for Building Machine Translation Systems for Minority Languages Vamshi Ambati Jaime Carbonell
[email protected] [email protected] Language Technologies Institute Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Abstract based MT systems require lexicons that provide cov- erage for the target translations, synchronous gram- Building machine translation (MT) for many mar rules that define the divergences in word-order minority languages in the world is a serious across the language-pair. In case of minority lan- challenge. For many minor languages there is guages one can only expect to find meagre amount little machine readable text, few knowledge- of such data, if any. Building such resources effec- able linguists, and little money available for MT development. For these reasons, it be- tively, within a constrained budget, and deploying an comes very important for an MT system to MT system is the need of the day. make best use of its resources, both labeled We first consider ‘Active Learning’ (AL) as a and unlabeled, in building a quality system. framework for building annotated data for the task In this paper we argue that traditional active learning setup may not be the right fit for seek- of MT. However, AL relies on unrealistic assump- ing annotations required for building a Syn- tions related to the annotation tasks. For instance, tax Based MT system for minority languages. AL assumes there is a unique omniscient oracle. In We posit that a relatively new variant of active MT, it is possible and more general to have multiple learning, Proactive Learning, is more suitable sources of information with differing reliabilities or for this task.