Fully Attentional Network for Low-Resource Academic Machine Translation and Post Editing

Abstract

English is accepted as an academic language in the world. This necessitates the use of English in their academic studies for speakers of other languages. Even when these researchers are competent in the use of the English language, some mistakes may occur while writing an academic article. To solve this problem, academicians tend to use automatic translation programs or get assistance from people with an advanced level of English. This study offers an expert system to enable assistance to the researchers throughout their academic article writing process. In this study, Turkish which is considered among low-resource languages is used as the source language. The proposed model combines the transformer encoder-decoder architecture model with the pre-trained Sci-BERT language model via the shallow fusion method. The model uses a Fully Attentional Network Layer instead of a Feed-Forward Network Layer in the known shallow fusion method. In this way, a higher success rate could be achieved by increasing the attention at the word level. Different metrics were used to evaluate the created model. The model created as a result of the experiments reached 45.1 BLEU and 73.2 METEOR scores. In addition, the proposed model achieved 20.12 and 20.56 scores, respectively, with the zero-shot translation method in the World Machine Translation (2017–2018) test datasets. The proposed method could inspire other low-resource languages to include the language model in the translation system. In this study, a corpus composed entirely of academic sentences is also introduced to be used in the translation system. The corpus consists of 1.2 million parallel sentences. The proposed model and corpus are made available to researchers on our GitHub page.