Simplify-then-Translate: Automatic Preprocessing for Black-Box Machine Translation

Understand

Black-box machine translation systems have proven incredibly useful for a variety of applications yet by design are hard to adapt, tune to a specific domain, or build on top of.

• In this work, we introduce a method to improve such systems via automatic pre-processing (APP) using sentence simplification.
• We first propose a method to automatically generate a large in-domain paraphrase corpus through back-translation with a black-box MT system, which is used to train a paraphrase model that "simplifies" the original sentence to be more conducive for translation.
• The model is used to preprocess source sentences of multiple low-resource language pairs.