Abstract

Typical statistical machine translation systems are trained with static parallel corpora. Here we account for scenarios with a continuous incoming stream of parallel training data. Such scenarios include daily governmental proceedings, sustained output from translation agencies, or crowd-sourced translations. We show incorporating recent sentence pairs from the stream improves performance compared with a static baseline. Since frequent batch retraining is computationally demanding we introduce a fast incremental alternative using an online version of the EM algorithm. To bound our memory requirements we use a novel data-structure and associated training regime. When compared to frequent batch retraining, our online time and space-bounded model achieves the same performance with significantly less computational overhead. 1

Citations