scholarly journals Neural Machine Translation with Joint Representation

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 8285-8292
Author(s):  
Yanyang Li ◽  
Qiang Wang ◽  
Tong Xiao ◽  
Tongran Liu ◽  
Jingbo Zhu

Though early successes of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems are attributed in part to the explicit modelling of the interaction between any two source and target units, e.g., alignment, the recent Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems resort to the attention which partially encodes the interaction for efficiency. In this paper, we employ Joint Representation that fully accounts for each possible interaction. We sidestep the inefficiency issue by refining representations with the proposed efficient attention operation. The resulting Reformer models offer a new Sequence-to-Sequence modelling paradigm besides the Encoder-Decoder framework and outperform the Transformer baseline in either the small scale IWSLT14 German-English, English-German and IWSLT15 Vietnamese-English or the large scale NIST12 Chinese-English translation tasks by about 1 BLEU point. We also propose a systematic model scaling approach, allowing the Reformer model to beat the state-of-the-art Transformer in IWSLT14 German-English and NIST12 Chinese-English with about 50% fewer parameters. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/lyy1994/reformer.

Author(s):  
Jinchao Zhang ◽  
Qun Liu ◽  
Jie Zhou

The encoder-decoder neural framework is widely employed for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) with a single encoder to represent the source sentence and a single decoder to generate target words. The translation performance heavily relies on the representation ability of the encoder and the generation ability of the decoder. To further enhance NMT, we propose to extend the original encoder-decoder framework to a novel one, which has multiple encoders and decoders (ME-MD). Through this way, multiple encoders extract more diverse features to represent the source sequence and multiple decoders capture more complicated translation knowledge. Our proposed ME-MD framework is convenient to integrate heterogeneous encoders and decoders with multiple depths and multiple types. Experiment on Chinese-English translation task shows that our ME-MD system surpasses the state-of-the-art NMT system by 2.1 BLEU points and surpasses the phrase-based Moses by 7.38 BLEU points. Our framework is general and can be applied to other sequence to sequence tasks.


Author(s):  
Rashmini Naranpanawa ◽  
Ravinga Perera ◽  
Thilakshi Fonseka ◽  
Uthayasanker Thayasivam

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a remarkable approach which performs much better than the Statistical machine translation (SMT) models when there is an abundance of parallel corpus. However, vanilla NMT is primarily based upon word-level with a fixed vocabulary. Therefore, low resource morphologically rich languages such as Sinhala are mostly affected by the out of vocabulary (OOV) and Rare word problems. Recent advancements in subword techniques have opened up opportunities for low resource communities by enabling open vocabulary translation. In this paper, we extend our recently published state-of-the-art EN-SI translation system using the transformer and explore standard subword techniques on top of it to identify which subword approach has a greater effect on English Sinhala language pair. Our models demonstrate that subword segmentation strategies along with the state-of-the-art NMT can perform remarkably when translating English sentences into a rich morphology language regardless of a large parallel corpus.


Author(s):  
Yingce Xia ◽  
Tianyu He ◽  
Xu Tan ◽  
Fei Tian ◽  
Di He ◽  
...  

Sharing source and target side vocabularies and word embeddings has been a popular practice in neural machine translation (briefly, NMT) for similar languages (e.g., English to French or German translation). The success of such wordlevel sharing motivates us to move one step further: we consider model-level sharing and tie the whole parts of the encoder and decoder of an NMT model. We share the encoder and decoder of Transformer (Vaswani et al. 2017), the state-of-the-art NMT model, and obtain a compact model named Tied Transformer. Experimental results demonstrate that such a simple method works well for both similar and dissimilar language pairs. We empirically verify our framework for both supervised NMT and unsupervised NMT: we achieve a 35.52 BLEU score on IWSLT 2014 German to English translation, 28.98/29.89 BLEU scores on WMT 2014 English to German translation without/with monolingual data, and a 22.05 BLEU score on WMT 2016 unsupervised German to English translation.


Author(s):  
Long Zhou ◽  
Jiajun Zhang ◽  
Chengqing Zong

Existing approaches to neural machine translation (NMT) generate the target language sequence token-by-token from left to right. However, this kind of unidirectional decoding framework cannot make full use of the target-side future contexts which can be produced in a right-to-left decoding direction, and thus suffers from the issue of unbalanced outputs. In this paper, we introduce a synchronous bidirectional–neural machine translation (SB-NMT) that predicts its outputs using left-to-right and right-to-left decoding simultaneously and interactively, in order to leverage both of the history and future information at the same time. Specifically, we first propose a new algorithm that enables synchronous bidirectional decoding in a single model. Then, we present an interactive decoding model in which left-to-right (right-to-left) generation does not only depend on its previously generated outputs, but also relies on future contexts predicted by right-to-left (left-to-right) decoding. We extensively evaluate the proposed SB-NMT model on large-scale NIST Chinese-English, WMT14 English-German, and WMT18 Russian-English translation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves significant improvements over the strong Transformer model by 3.92, 1.49, and 1.04 BLEU points, respectively, and obtains the state-of-the-art per- formance on Chinese-English and English- German translation tasks. 1


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 7594-7601
Author(s):  
Pierre Colombo ◽  
Emile Chapuis ◽  
Matteo Manica ◽  
Emmanuel Vignon ◽  
Giovanna Varni ◽  
...  

The task of predicting dialog acts (DA) based on conversational dialog is a key component in the development of conversational agents. Accurately predicting DAs requires a precise modeling of both the conversation and the global tag dependencies. We leverage seq2seq approaches widely adopted in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to improve the modelling of tag sequentiality. Seq2seq models are known to learn complex global dependencies while currently proposed approaches using linear conditional random fields (CRF) only model local tag dependencies. In this work, we introduce a seq2seq model tailored for DA classification using: a hierarchical encoder, a novel guided attention mechanism and beam search applied to both training and inference. Compared to the state of the art our model does not require handcrafted features and is trained end-to-end. Furthermore, the proposed approach achieves an unmatched accuracy score of 85% on SwDA, and state-of-the-art accuracy score of 91.6% on MRDA.


Author(s):  
Hao Xiong ◽  
Zhongjun He ◽  
Hua Wu ◽  
Haifeng Wang

Discourse coherence plays an important role in the translation of one text. However, the previous reported models most focus on improving performance over individual sentence while ignoring cross-sentence links and dependencies, which affects the coherence of the text. In this paper, we propose to use discourse context and reward to refine the translation quality from the discourse perspective. In particular, we generate the translation of individual sentences at first. Next, we deliberate the preliminary produced translations, and train the model to learn the policy that produces discourse coherent text by a reward teacher. Practical results on multiple discourse test datasets indicate that our model significantly improves the translation quality over the state-of-the-art baseline system by +1.23 BLEU score. Moreover, our model generates more discourse coherent text and obtains +2.2 BLEU improvements when evaluated by discourse metrics.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Sukanta Sen ◽  
Mohammed Hasanuzzaman ◽  
Asif Ekbal ◽  
Pushpak Bhattacharyya ◽  
Andy Way

Abstract Neural machine translation (NMT) has recently shown promising results on publicly available benchmark datasets and is being rapidly adopted in various production systems. However, it requires high-quality large-scale parallel corpus, and it is not always possible to have sufficiently large corpus as it requires time, money, and professionals. Hence, many existing large-scale parallel corpus are limited to the specific languages and domains. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to improve an NMT system in low-resource scenario without using any additional data. Our approach aims at augmenting the original training data by means of parallel phrases extracted from the original training data itself using a statistical machine translation (SMT) system. Our proposed approach is based on the gated recurrent unit (GRU) and transformer networks. We choose the Hindi–English, Hindi–Bengali datasets for Health, Tourism, and Judicial (only for Hindi–English) domains. We train our NMT models for 10 translation directions, each using only 5–23k parallel sentences. Experiments show the improvements in the range of 1.38–15.36 BiLingual Evaluation Understudy points over the baseline systems. Experiments show that transformer models perform better than GRU models in low-resource scenarios. In addition to that, we also find that our proposed method outperforms SMT—which is known to work better than the neural models in low-resource scenarios—for some translation directions. In order to further show the effectiveness of our proposed model, we also employ our approach to another interesting NMT task, for example, old-to-modern English translation, using a tiny parallel corpus of only 2.7K sentences. For this task, we use publicly available old-modern English text which is approximately 1000 years old. Evaluation for this task shows significant improvement over the baseline NMT.


Author(s):  
Zakaria El Maazouzi ◽  
Badr Eddine EL Mohajir ◽  
Mohammed Al Achhab

Achieving high accuracy in automatic translation tasks has been one of the challenging goals for researchers in the area of machine translation since decades. Thus, the eagerness of exploring new possible ways to improve machine translation was always the matter for researchers in the field. Automatic translation as a key application in the natural language processing domain has developed many approaches, namely statistical machine translation and recently neural machine translation that improved largely the translation quality especially for Latin languages. They have even made it possible for the translation of some language pairs to approach human translation quality. In this paper, we present a survey of the state of the art of statistical translation, where we describe the different existing methodologies, and we overview the recent research studies while pointing out the main strengths and limitations of the different approaches.  


2006 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 527-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
José B. Mariño ◽  
Rafael E. Banchs ◽  
Josep M. Crego ◽  
Adrià de Gispert ◽  
Patrik Lambert ◽  
...  

This article describes in detail an n-gram approach to statistical machine translation. This approach consists of a log-linear combination of a translation model based on n-grams of bilingual units, which are referred to as tuples, along with four specific feature functions. Translation performance, which happens to be in the state of the art, is demonstrated with Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish translations of the European Parliament Plenary Sessions (EPPS).


Author(s):  
Rui Wang ◽  
Xu Tan ◽  
Renqian Luo ◽  
Tao Qin ◽  
Tie-Yan Liu

Neural approaches have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on machine translation but suffer from the high cost of collecting large scale parallel data. Thus, a lot of research has been conducted for neural machine translation (NMT) with very limited parallel data, i.e., the low-resource setting. In this paper, we provide a survey for low-resource NMT and classify related works into three categories according to the auxiliary data they used: (1) exploiting monolingual data of source and/or target languages, (2) exploiting data from auxiliary languages, and (3) exploiting multi-modal data. We hope that our survey can help researchers to better understand this field and inspire them to design better algorithms, and help industry practitioners to choose appropriate algorithms for their applications.


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