Robust Guidance for Unsupervised Data Selection: Capturing Perplexing Named Entities for Domain-Specific Machine Translation

Employing extensive datasets enables the training of multilingual machine translation models; however, these models often fail to accurately translate sentences within specialized domains. Although obtaining and translating domain-specific data incurs high costs, it is inevitable for high-quality translations. Hence, finding the most 'effective' data with an unsupervised setting becomes a practical strategy for reducing labeling costs. Recent research indicates that this effective data could be found by selecting 'properly difficult data' based on its volume. This means the data should not be excessively challenging or overly simplistic, especially if the amount of data is limited. However, we found that establishing a criterion for unsupervised data selection remains challenging, as the 'proper difficulty' might vary based on the data domain being trained on. We introduce a novel unsupervised data selection method, 'Capturing Perplexing Named Entities', which adopts the maximum inference entropy in translated named entities as a selection measure. The motivation was that named entities in domain-specific data are considered the most complex portion of the data and should be predicted with high confidence. When verified with the 'Korean-English Parallel Corpus of Specialized Domains,' our method served as a robust guidance for unsupervised data selection, in contrast to existing methods.