Alleviating Distribution Shift in Synthetic Data for Machine Translation Quality Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Geng, Xiang, Lai, Zhejian, Chen, Jiajun, Yang, Hao, Huang, Shujian
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Geng, Xiang
Lai, Zhejian
Chen, Jiajun
Yang, Hao
Huang, Shujian
author_facet Geng, Xiang
Lai, Zhejian
Chen, Jiajun
Yang, Hao
Huang, Shujian
contents Quality Estimation (QE) models evaluate the quality of machine translations without reference translations, serving as the reward models for the translation task. Due to the data scarcity, synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising solution. However, synthetic QE data often suffers from distribution shift, which can manifest as discrepancies between pseudo and real translations, or in pseudo labels that do not align with human preferences. To tackle this issue, we introduce DCSQE, a novel framework for alleviating distribution shift in synthetic QE data. To reduce the difference between pseudo and real translations, we employ the constrained beam search algorithm and enhance translation diversity through the use of distinct generation models. DCSQE uses references, i.e., translation supervision signals, to guide both the generation and annotation processes, enhancing the quality of token-level labels. DCSQE further identifies the shortest phrase covering consecutive error tokens, mimicking human annotation behavior, to assign the final phrase-level labels. Specially, we underscore that the translation model can not annotate translations of itself accurately. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DCSQE outperforms SOTA baselines like CometKiwi in both supervised and unsupervised settings. Further analysis offers insights into synthetic data generation that could benefit reward models for other tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/njuqe.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_19941
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Alleviating Distribution Shift in Synthetic Data for Machine Translation Quality Estimation
Geng, Xiang
Lai, Zhejian
Chen, Jiajun
Yang, Hao
Huang, Shujian
Computation and Language
Quality Estimation (QE) models evaluate the quality of machine translations without reference translations, serving as the reward models for the translation task. Due to the data scarcity, synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising solution. However, synthetic QE data often suffers from distribution shift, which can manifest as discrepancies between pseudo and real translations, or in pseudo labels that do not align with human preferences. To tackle this issue, we introduce DCSQE, a novel framework for alleviating distribution shift in synthetic QE data. To reduce the difference between pseudo and real translations, we employ the constrained beam search algorithm and enhance translation diversity through the use of distinct generation models. DCSQE uses references, i.e., translation supervision signals, to guide both the generation and annotation processes, enhancing the quality of token-level labels. DCSQE further identifies the shortest phrase covering consecutive error tokens, mimicking human annotation behavior, to assign the final phrase-level labels. Specially, we underscore that the translation model can not annotate translations of itself accurately. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DCSQE outperforms SOTA baselines like CometKiwi in both supervised and unsupervised settings. Further analysis offers insights into synthetic data generation that could benefit reward models for other tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/njuqe.
title Alleviating Distribution Shift in Synthetic Data for Machine Translation Quality Estimation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19941