Adaptation of Back-translation to Automatic Post-Editing for Synthetic Data Generation
Automatic Post-Editing (APE) aims to correct errors in the output of a given machine translation (MT) system. Although data-driven approaches have become prevalent also in the APE task as in many other NLP tasks, there has been a lack of qualified training data due to the high cost of manual construction. eSCAPE, a synthetic APE corpus, has been widely used to alleviate the data scarcity, but it might not address genuine APE corpora{'}s characteristic that the post-edited sentence should be a minimally edited revision of the given MT output. Therefore, we propose two new methods of synthesizing additional MT outputs by adapting back-translation to the APE task, obtaining robust enlargements of the existing synthetic APE training dataset. Experimental results on the WMT English-German APE benchmarks demonstrate that our enlarged datasets are effective in improving APE performance.
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