scholarly journals Machine translation of English content: A comparative study of different methods

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 980-987
Author(s):  
Jinfeng Xue

Abstract Based on neural machine translation, this article introduced the ConvS2S system and transformer system, designed a semantic sharing combined transformer system to improve translation quality, and compared the three systems on the NIST dataset. The results showed that the operation speed of the semantic sharing combined transformer system was the highest, reaching 3934.27 words per second; the BLEU value of the ConvS2S system was the smallest, followed by the transformer system and the semantic sharing combined transformer system. Taking NIST08 as an example, the BLEU values of the designed system were 4.74 and 1.49 higher than the other two systems. The analysis of examples showed that the semantic sharing combined transformer had higher translation quality. The experimental results show that the proposed system is reliable in English content translation and can be further promoted and applied in practice.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Quan Du ◽  
Kai Feng ◽  
Chen Xu ◽  
Tong Xiao ◽  
Jingbo Zhu

Recently, many efforts have been devoted to speeding up neural machine translation models. Among them, the non-autoregressive translation (NAT) model is promising because it removes the sequential dependence on the previously generated tokens and parallelizes the generation process of the entire sequence. On the other hand, the autoregressive translation (AT) model in general achieves a higher translation accuracy than the NAT counterpart. Therefore, a natural idea is to fuse the AT and NAT models to seek a trade-off between inference speed and translation quality. This paper proposes an ARF-NAT model (NAT with auxiliary representation fusion) to introduce the merit of a shallow AT model to an NAT model. Three functions are designed to fuse the auxiliary representation into the decoder of the NAT model. Experimental results show that ARF-NAT outperforms the NAT baseline by 5.26 BLEU scores on the WMT’14 German-English task with a significant speedup (7.58 times) over several strong AT baselines.


Author(s):  
Ying Qin ◽  
Chunqing Wang

With the rapid development of machine translation, the research of man-machine coordinated translation is drawing much concern. This paper explores roles of machine translation on advance preparation for simultaneous interpreting. We carry out a comparative study on 14 student interpreters, which are divided into experimental group and control group. The students in experimental group are allowed to use machine translation to prepare for a simultaneous interpreting, while the students in control group are not. The experimental results show that errors in machine translation might mislead the student interpreters in the simultaneous interpreting practice. On the other hand, if the time of preparation is limited, it is better not to resort to machine to make preparation because of time-consuming proofreading, or twice the effort would achieve half the result.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (01) ◽  
pp. 137-151
Author(s):  
Prabhakar Gupta ◽  
Mayank Sharma

We demonstrate the potential for using aligned bilingual word embeddings in developing an unsupervised method to evaluate machine translations without a need for parallel translation corpus or reference corpus. We explain different aspects of digital entertainment content subtitles. We share our experimental results for four languages pairs English to French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and present findings on the shortcomings of Neural Machine Translation for subtitles. We propose several improvements over the system designed by Gupta et al. [P. Gupta, S. Shekhawat and K. Kumar, Unsupervised quality estimation without reference corpus for subtitle machine translation using word embeddings, IEEE 13th Int. Conf. Semantic Computing, 2019, pp. 32–38.] by incorporating custom embedding model curated to subtitles, compound word splits and punctuation inclusion. We show a massive run time improvement of the order of [Formula: see text] by considering three types of edits, removing Proximity Intensity Index (PII) and changing post-edit score calculation from their system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 710-725
Author(s):  
Benjamin Marie ◽  
Atsushi Fujita

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems are usually trained on clean parallel data. They can perform very well for translating clean in-domain texts. However, as demonstrated by previous work, the translation quality significantly worsens when translating noisy texts, such as user-generated texts (UGT) from online social media. Given the lack of parallel data of UGT that can be used to train or adapt NMT systems, we synthesize parallel data of UGT, exploiting monolingual data of UGT through crosslingual language model pre-training and zero-shot NMT systems. This paper presents two different but complementary approaches: One alters given clean parallel data into UGT-like parallel data whereas the other generates translations from monolingual data of UGT. On the MTNT translation tasks, we show that our synthesized parallel data can lead to better NMT systems for UGT while making them more robust in translating texts from various domains and styles.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (13) ◽  
pp. 1589
Author(s):  
Yongkeun Hwang ◽  
Yanghoon Kim ◽  
Kyomin Jung

Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the text generation tasks which has achieved significant improvement with the rise of deep neural networks. However, language-specific problems such as handling the translation of honorifics received little attention. In this paper, we propose a context-aware NMT to promote translation improvements of Korean honorifics. By exploiting the information such as the relationship between speakers from the surrounding sentences, our proposed model effectively manages the use of honorific expressions. Specifically, we utilize a novel encoder architecture that can represent the contextual information of the given input sentences. Furthermore, a context-aware post-editing (CAPE) technique is adopted to refine a set of inconsistent sentence-level honorific translations. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, honorific-labeled test data is required. Thus, we also design a heuristic that labels Korean sentences to distinguish between honorific and non-honorific styles. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms sentence-level NMT baselines both in overall translation quality and honorific translations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Zhiqiang Yu ◽  
Yuxin Huang ◽  
Junjun Guo

It has been shown that the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) drops starkly in low-resource conditions. Thai-Lao is a typical low-resource language pair of tiny parallel corpus, leading to suboptimal NMT performance on it. However, Thai and Lao have considerable similarities in linguistic morphology and have bilingual lexicon which is relatively easy to obtain. To use this feature, we first build a bilingual similarity lexicon composed of pairs of similar words. Then we propose a novel NMT architecture to leverage the similarity between Thai and Lao. Specifically, besides the prevailing sentence encoder, we introduce an extra similarity lexicon encoder into the conventional encoder-decoder architecture, by which the semantic information carried by the similarity lexicon can be represented. We further provide a simple mechanism in the decoder to balance the information representations delivered from the input sentence and the similarity lexicon. Our approach can fully exploit linguistic similarity carried by the similarity lexicon to improve translation quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art Transformer baseline system and previous similar works.


Author(s):  
Raj Dabre ◽  
Atsushi Fujita

In encoder-decoder based sequence-to-sequence modeling, the most common practice is to stack a number of recurrent, convolutional, or feed-forward layers in the encoder and decoder. While the addition of each new layer improves the sequence generation quality, this also leads to a significant increase in the number of parameters. In this paper, we propose to share parameters across all layers thereby leading to a recurrently stacked sequence-to-sequence model. We report on an extensive case study on neural machine translation (NMT) using our proposed method, experimenting with a variety of datasets. We empirically show that the translation quality of a model that recurrently stacks a single-layer 6 times, despite its significantly fewer parameters, approaches that of a model that stacks 6 different layers. We also show how our method can benefit from a prevalent way for improving NMT, i.e., extending training data with pseudo-parallel corpora generated by back-translation. We then analyze the effects of recurrently stacked layers by visualizing the attentions of models that use recurrently stacked layers and models that do not. Finally, we explore the limits of parameter sharing where we share even the parameters between the encoder and decoder in addition to recurrent stacking of layers.


Author(s):  
Yang Zhao ◽  
Jiajun Zhang ◽  
Yu Zhou ◽  
Chengqing Zong

Knowledge graphs (KGs) store much structured information on various entities, many of which are not covered by the parallel sentence pairs of neural machine translation (NMT). To improve the translation quality of these entities, in this paper we propose a novel KGs enhanced NMT method. Specifically, we first induce the new translation results of these entities by transforming the source and target KGs into a unified semantic space. We then generate adequate pseudo parallel sentence pairs that contain these induced entity pairs. Finally, NMT model is jointly trained by the original and pseudo sentence pairs. The extensive experiments on Chinese-to-English and Englishto-Japanese translation tasks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the strong baseline models in translation quality, especially in handling the induced entities.


Author(s):  
Xiaomian Kang ◽  
Yang Zhao ◽  
Jiajun Zhang ◽  
Chengqing Zong

Document-level neural machine translation (DocNMT) has yielded attractive improvements. In this article, we systematically analyze the discourse phenomena in Chinese-to-English translation, and focus on the most obvious ones, namely lexical translation consistency. To alleviate the lexical inconsistency, we propose an effective approach that is aware of the words which need to be translated consistently and constrains the model to produce more consistent translations. Specifically, we first introduce a global context extractor to extract the document context and consistency context, respectively. Then, the two types of global context are integrated into a encoder enhancer and a decoder enhancer to improve the lexical translation consistency. We create a test set to evaluate the lexical consistency automatically. Experiments demonstrate that our approach can significantly alleviate the lexical translation inconsistency. In addition, our approach can also substantially improve the translation quality compared to sentence-level Transformer.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (01) ◽  
pp. 2050002
Author(s):  
Taichi Aida ◽  
Kazuhide Yamamoto

Current methods of neural machine translation may generate sentences with different levels of quality. Methods for automatically evaluating translation output from machine translation can be broadly classified into two types: a method that uses human post-edited translations for training an evaluation model, and a method that uses a reference translation that is the correct answer during evaluation. On the one hand, it is difficult to prepare post-edited translations because it is necessary to tag each word in comparison with the original translated sentences. On the other hand, users who actually employ the machine translation system do not have a correct reference translation. Therefore, we propose a method that trains the evaluation model without using human post-edited sentences and in the test set, estimates the quality of output sentences without using reference translations. We define some indices and predict the quality of translations with a regression model. For the quality of the translated sentences, we employ the BLEU score calculated from the number of word [Formula: see text]-gram matches between the translated sentence and the reference translation. After that, we compute the correlation between quality scores predicted by our method and BLEU actually computed from references. According to the experimental results, the correlation with BLEU is the highest when XGBoost uses all the indices. Moreover, looking at each index, we find that the sentence log-likelihood and the model uncertainty, which are based on the joint probability of generating the translated sentence, are important in BLEU estimation.


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