Improving a Multi-Source Neural Machine Translation Model with Corpus Extension for Low-Resource Languages

Abstract: In machine translation, we often try to collect resources to improve performance. However, most of the language pairs, such as Korean-Arabic and Korean-Vietnamese, do not have enough resources to train machine translation systems. In this paper, we propose the use of synthetic methods for extending a low-resource corpus and apply it to a multi-source neural machine translation model. We showed the improvement of machine translation performance through corpus extension using the synthetic method. We specifically focused on how to create source sentences that can make better target sentences, including the use of synthetic methods. We found that the corpus extension could also improve the performance of multi-source neural machine translation. We showed the corpus extension and multi-source model to be efficient methods for a low-resource language pair. Furthermore, when both methods were used together, we found better machine translation performance.