This repository contains the code needed to run multi-task learning data augmentation (MaTiLDA), a method for neural machine translation data augmentation presented in the paper:

V. M. Sánchez-Cartagena, M. Esplà-Gomis, J. A. Pérez-Ortiz and F. Sánchez-Martínez, "Non-Fluent Synthetic Target-Language Data Improve Neural Machine Translation," in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2023.3333949.

MaTiLDA is distributed as a set of modules for fairseq. It has been tested with fairseq 0.10.2 and Python 3.7. In order to set up the environment, please follow these steps.

Create a Python virtualenv and activate it:

virtualenv -p python3.7 ~/envs/matilda
source ~/envs/matilda/bin/activate

Clone and init submodules:

git clone https://github.com/transducens/MaTiLDA.git
cd MaTiLDA
git submodule update --init --recursive

Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

If you are going to add the "replace" or "mono" auxiliary tasks, you will need to install MGIZA++ as follows. You can skip this section if you are not going to produce synthetic data with these auxiliary tasks. Execute these commands inside the MaTiLDA working copy diectory:

git clone https://github.com/moses-smt/mgiza.git
cd mgiza/mgizapp
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
ln -s $PWD/../scripts/merge_alignment.py $PWD/bin/merge_alignment.py
cd ../../..

Once finished, export the Bash environment variable MTLDA_MGIZAPP with the path to the MGIZA++ installation directory. The training scripts make use of this environment variable.

export MTLDA_MGIZAPP=$PWD/mgiza/mgizapp/build/bin/

You can download part of the corpora we used in our experiments (low-resource scenario for en-de, en-he and en-vi) as follows:

wget http://www.dlsi.ua.es/~vmsanchez/emnlp2021-data.tar.gz
tar xvzf emnlp2021-data.tar.gz

In order to train a baseline system, run the script shown below, where the Bash variables have the following meaning:

• $L1 and $L2: source and target languages codes. Use en for English, de for German, he for Hebrew and vi for Vietnamese.
• $PAIR: language pair. We always consider English as the first language of the pair, regardless of whether it acts as the source of the target language. Possible values are en-de, en-he, and en-vi.
• $DIR: path to the directory that will be created during the training process and will contain files with the intermediate steps and results.
• $bpe: number of BPE merge operations. We used 10000 in all the experiments reported in the paper.
• $TRAINSET: training data to use. Use iwslt to use the data from the downloaded package.

./train-baseline.sh $L1 $L2 $DIR $bpe data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/train data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/dev data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/test

You can find the resulting BLEU and chrF++ scores in the file $DIR/eval/report-train

By default, the GPU 0 as shown by the the nvidia-smi command will be used to train the system. If you want to use another GPU, prepend the string CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=NUM_GPU to the training command, as in the following example:

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=2 ./train-baseline.sh $L1 $L2 $DIR $bpe data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/train data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/dev data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/test

The Bash variables have the same meaning as in the previous section, and we have a new one:

• $AUXTASK: use rev for training with the "reverse" auxiliary task and src for training with the "source" auxiliary task.

./train-mtlsampleefficient.sh $L1 $L2 $DIR $bpe data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/train data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/dev data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/test $AUXTASK

You can find the resulting BLEU and chrF++ scores in the file $DIR/eval/report-tune. If that file does not exists because BLEU in the development set did not improve during finetuning, scores can be found in the file $DIR/eval/report-tune.

The "token" and "swap" auxiliary tasks require an alpha parameter that controls the proportion of the sentence which is modified. Moreover, as the random modifications are different in each training epoch, we need to specify the number of expected training epochs in order to precompute the modifications and save training time. To be on the safe side, it is recommended to use 1.5 the number of training epochs of a baseline system without MaTiLDA. This is the meaning of the Bash variables used in the script below:

• $AUXTASK: use wrdp2 for training with the "token" auxiliary task and swap for training with the "swap" auxiliary task.
• $ALPHA: proportion of the tokens in the target sentence that are modified.
• $PRECOMPEPOCHS: number of expected training epochs.

./train-mtlsampleefficient.sh $L1 $L2 $DIR $bpe data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/train data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/dev data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/test $AUXTASK $PRECOMPEPOCHS $ALPHA

The "replace" task requires word-aligning the training data and extracting a bilingual lexicon from it. In addition to MGIZA++, we will need a working installation of Moses. Please follow the Moses official installation instructions. Once installed, export the Bash environment variable MTLDA_MOSES with the path to the Moses root directory, as in the following example:

export MTLDA_MOSES=/home/myuser/software/mosesdecoder

Once the envitonment variables MTLDA_MOSES and MTLDA_MGIZAPP have been exported, you can train a system by issuing a command similar to the ones depicted for other auxiliary tasks:

./train-mtlsampleefficient.sh $L1 $L2 $DIR $bpe data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/train data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/dev data/$TRAINSET-$PAIR/test replace $PRECOMPEPOCHS $ALPHA

If you use this repository as part of your developments, please cite it as follows:

@ARTICLE{10321682,
  author={Sánchez-Cartagena, Víctor M. and Esplà-Gomis, Miquel and Pérez-Ortiz, Juan Antonio and Sánchez-Martínez, Felipe},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence}, 
  title={Non-Fluent Synthetic Target-Language Data Improve Neural Machine Translation}, 
  year={2024},
  volume={46},
  number={2},
  pages={837-850},
  keywords={Training;Task analysis;Multitasking;Machine translation;Data augmentation;Data models;Neural networks;Data augmentation;low-resource languages;machine translation;multi-task learning},
  doi={10.1109/TPAMI.2023.3333949}}

A CITATION.cff file is also included in this repository.