This repository builds on the idea of back translation as a data augmentation method. The idea is simple: translating a sentence in one language to another and then back to the original language. This way one can multiply the size of any NLP dataset.

We present demonstrations of how to use the code in this repository as well as some other free resources through a series of Google Colab. Initially we trained Vietnamese-English and English-Vietnamese models for back-translation. The code in this repository, however, can work with any other pair of languages. We therefore invite love, attention and pull requests from you on:

• More and/or better translation models.

• More and/or better translation data or monolingual data.

• Code to make our code even easier to use!

We make use of the tensor2tensor library to build deep neural networks that perform translation.

We have prepared here a series of Google Colabs Notebooks to walk you through how to use our code in real contexts. You will be shown how to make use of free computational and free storage resources.

• Interactive Back Translation: A minimal Colab for you to play with our final results. We use this colab to generate the GIF you saw above.

• Training Translation Models: How to connect to GPU/TPU and Google Drive/Cloud storage, download training/testing data and train/evaluate your models. We use the IWSLT'15 dataset, tiny setting of the Transformer and off-the-shelf implementation from tensor2tensor and obtain the following result:

This result is definitely not state-of-the-art, but is quite good and more importantly, good enough to be useful for the purpose of this project! Check the following Colabs to see how we make use of these translation models to improve results on small datasets:

• Analyse your Translation Models: Play with and visualize the trained models attention.

• Use Translation Models to Augment An NLP Dataset: See an example of how to augment a small NLP dataset in Vietnamese using your translation models and obtain real gains on test set. On a Vietnamese Sentiment Analysis dataset with only 10K examples, we use back-translation to double the training set size and obtain an improvement of near 2.5% in absolute accuracy:

Here is another GIF demo with a Vietnamese sentence, for fun:

If you make use of code/resources provided in this project, please cite the following BibTex:

@article{trieu19backtranslate,
  author  = {Trieu H. Trinh and Thang Le and Phat Hoang and Minh{-}Thang Luong},
  title   = {Back Translation as Data Augmentation Tutorial},
  journal = {https://github.com/vietai/back_translate},
  year    = {2019},
}

The rest of this README is for those who cannot have access to our Colab Notebook and/or only need to see the syntax of some commands to run our code.

A prerequisite to performing back-translation is to train two translation models: English to Vietnamese and Vietnamese to English. A demonstration of the following commands to generate data, train and evaluate the models can be found in this Google Colab.

For English -> Vietnamese

python t2t_datagen.py --data_dir=data/translate_envi_iwslt32k --tmp_dir=tmp/ --problem=translate_envi_iwslt32k

For Vietnamese -> English

python t2t_datagen.py --data_dir=data/translate_vien_iwslt32k --tmp_dir=tmp/ --problem=translate_vien_iwslt32k

Some examples to train your translation models with the Transformer architecture:

For English -> Vietnamese

python t2t_trainer.py --data_dir=path/to/tfrecords --problem=translate_envi_iwslt32k --hparams_set=transformer_base --model=transformer --output_dir=path/to/ckpt/dir

For Vietnamese -> English

python t2t_trainer.py --data_dir=path/to/tfrecords --problem=translate_vien_iwslt32k --hparams_set=transformer_base --model=transformer --output_dir=path/to/ckpt/dir

Once you finished training and evaluating the models, you can certainly play around with them a bit. For example, you might want to run some interactive translation and/or visualize the attention masks for your inputs of choice. This is demonstrated in this Google Colab.

We have trained two translation models (vien and envi) using the tiny setting of tensor2tensor's Transformer, and put it on Google Cloud Storage with public access for you to use.

Here is an example of back translating Vietnamese -> English -> Vietnamese from an input text file.

python back_translate.py --lang=vi --decode_hparams="beam_size=4,alpha=0.6" --paraphrase_from_file=test_input.vi --paraphrase_to_file=test_output.vi --model=transformer --hparams_set=transformer_tiny

For a demonstration of augmenting real datasets with back-translation and obtaining actual gains in accuracy, checkout this Google Colab!