Seeking to Reproduce "Easy Domain Adaptation"
The frustratingly easy domain adaptation technique proposed by Daume III (2007) is simple, easy to implement, and reported to be very successful in a range of NLP tasks (named entity recognition, part of speech tagging, and shallow parsing) giving us high hopes of successfully replicating and applying it to an English Portuguese hybrid machine translation system. While our hopes became 'frustration' in one translation direction as the results obtained with the domain adapted model do not improve upon the in domain baseline model our results are more encouraging in the opposite direction. This paper describes our replication of the technique and our application of it to machine translation, and offers a discussion on possible reasons for our mixed success in doing so.