Epi-Curriculum: Episodic Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Domain Adaptation in Neural Machine Translation

Abstract: Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have become successful, but their performance remains poor when translating on new domains with a limited number of data. In this paper, we present a novel approach Epi-Curriculum to address low-resource domain adaptation (DA), which contains a new episodic training framework along with denoised curriculum learning. Our episodic training framework enhances the model's robustness to domain shift by episodically exposing the encoder/decoder to an inexperienced decoder/encoder. The denoised curriculum learning filters the noised data and further improves the model's adaptability by gradually guiding the learning process from easy to more difficult tasks. Experiments on English-German and English-Romanian translation show that: (i) Epi-Curriculum improves both model's robustness and adaptability in seen and unseen domains; (ii) Our episodic training framework enhances the encoder and decoder's robustness to domain shift.