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Dual Reconstruction: a Unifying Objective for Semi-Supervised Neural Machine Translation

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 Added by Weijia Xu
 Publication date 2020
and research's language is English




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While Iterative Back-Translation and Dual Learning effectively incorporate monolingual training data in neural machine translation, they use different objectives and heuristic gradient approximation strategies, and have not been extensively compared. We introduce a novel dual reconstruction objective that provides a unified view of Iterative Back-Translation and Dual Learning. It motivates a theoretical analysis and controlled empirical study on German-English and Turkish-English tasks, which both suggest that Iterative Back-Translation is more effective than Dual Learning despite its relative simplicity.



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