Huawei AARC’s Submissions to the WMT21 Biomedical Translation Task: Domain Adaption from a Practical Perspective

AbstractThis paper describes Huawei Artificial Intelligence Application Research Center’s neural machine translation systems and submissions to the WMT21 biomedical translation shared task. Four of the submissions achieve state-of-the-art BLEU scores based on the official-released automatic evaluation results (EN->FR, EN<->IT and ZH->EN). We perform experiments to unveil the practical insights of the involved domain adaptation techniques, including finetuning order, terminology dictionaries, and ensemble decoding. Issues associated with overfitting and under-translation are also discussed.