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Unbabel’s Submission to the WMT2019 APE Shared Task: BERT-Based Encoder-Decoder for Automatic Post-Editing

Lopes, A. ; Farajian, M. ; Correia, G. ; Trénous, J. ; Martins, A.

Unbabel’s Submission to the WMT2019 APE Shared Task: BERT-Based Encoder-Decoder for Automatic Post-Editing, Proc Conference on Machine Translation WMT, Florence, Italy, Vol. , pp. - , July, 2019.

Digital Object Identifier: 10.18653/v1/W19-5413

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Abstract
This paper describes Unbabel’s submission to the WMT2019 APE Shared Task for the English-German language pair. Following the recent rise of large, powerful, pre-trained models, we adapt the BERT pretrained model to perform Automatic Post-Editing in an encoder-decoder framework. Analogously to dual-encoder architectures we develop a BERT-based encoder-decoder (BED) model in which a single pretrained BERT encoder receives both the source src and machine translation mt strings. Furthermore, we explore a conservativeness factor to constrain the APE system to perform fewer edits. As the official results show, when trained on a weighted combination of in-domain and artificial training data, our BED system with the conservativeness penalty improves significantly the translations of a strong NMT system by -0.78 and +1.23 in terms of TER and BLEU, respectively. Finally, our submission achieves a new state-of-the-art, ex-aequo, in English-German APE of NMT.