# Word-based Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.03129 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03129/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Improving Both Domain Robustness and Domain Adaptability in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08288/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we empirically investigate applying word-level weights to adapt neural machine translation to e-commerce domains, where small e-commerce datasets and large out-of-domain datasets are available. In order to mine in-domain like words in the out-of-domain datasets, we compute word weights by using a domain-specific and a non-domain-specific language model followed by smoothing and binary quantization. The baseline model is trained on mixed in-domain and out-of-domain datasets. Experimental results on English to Chinese e-commerce domain translation show that compared to continuing training without word weights, it improves MT quality by up to 2.11% BLEU absolute and 1.59% TER. We have also trained models using fine-tuning on the in-domain data. Pre-training a model with word weights improves fine-tuning up to 1.24% BLEU absolute and 1.64% TER, respectively.