Bridging Domains for Automatic Post-Editing: A Classifier-Guided Multi-Domain Adaptation Framework

Bridging Domains for Automatic Post-Editing: A Classifier-Guided Multi-Domain Adaptation Framework

Abstract

Automatic Post-Editing (APE) is a widely studied approach for enhancing the output quality of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems. While most prior work has focused on general-purpose APE, the potential of domain-specific APE, such as for personalized or specialized content, remains underexplored due to the scarcity of domain-labeled training data. In this work, we investigate domain adaptation for APE using adapter-based methods. Our proposed multitask learning-based domain adaptation framework includes the use of a domain classifier to get a weighted combination of parallel domain-specific adapters at inference time, without requiring prior domain knowledge. This design allows the model to leverage cross-domain similarities, making it especially robust in low-resource domain scenarios. Our experimental results on English–German, English–Marathi, and English–Tamil pairs across different domains for each pair show substantial improvements over their respective general-purpose APE baselines. To facilitate further research, we will release human-annotated domain labels for triplets in WMT22 English–Marathi, and WMT24 English–Tamil APE datasets and the code.

Publication
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)