The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Human and Machine Translations for Multilingual Semantic Parsing with Active Learning

Zhuang Li, Lizhen Qu, Philip Cohen, Raj Tumuluri, Gholamreza Haffari


Abstract
Multilingual semantic parsing aims to leverage the knowledge from the high-resource languages to improve low-resource semantic parsing, yet commonly suffers from the data imbalance problem. Prior works propose to utilize the translations by either humans or machines to alleviate such issues. However, human translations are expensive, while machine translations are cheap but prone to error and bias. In this work, we propose an active learning approach that exploits the strengths of both human and machine translations by iteratively adding small batches of human translations into the machine-translated training set. Besides, we propose novel aggregated acquisition criteria that help our active learning method select utterances to be manually translated. Our experiments demonstrate that an ideal utterance selection can significantly reduce the error and bias in the translated data, resulting in higher parser accuracies than the parsers merely trained on the machine-translated data.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.529
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9511–9528
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.529
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.529
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhuang Li, Lizhen Qu, Philip Cohen, Raj Tumuluri, and Gholamreza Haffari. 2023. The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Human and Machine Translations for Multilingual Semantic Parsing with Active Learning. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9511–9528, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Human and Machine Translations for Multilingual Semantic Parsing with Active Learning (Li et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.529.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.529.mp4