scholarly journals Generating Diverse Translation by Manipulating Multi-Head Attention

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 8976-8983
Author(s):  
Zewei Sun ◽  
Shujian Huang ◽  
Hao-Ran Wei ◽  
Xin-yu Dai ◽  
Jiajun Chen
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Data Augmentation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Generation Task ◽  
Interesting Phenomenon ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Back Translation ◽  
Auxiliary Experiment ◽  
Word Translation ◽  
Transformer Model

Transformer model (Vaswani et al. 2017) has been widely used in machine translation tasks and obtained state-of-the-art results. In this paper, we report an interesting phenomenon in its encoder-decoder multi-head attention: different attention heads of the final decoder layer align to different word translation candidates. We empirically verify this discovery and propose a method to generate diverse translations by manipulating heads. Furthermore, we make use of these diverse translations with the back-translation technique for better data augmentation. Experiment results show that our method generates diverse translations without a severe drop in translation quality. Experiments also show that back-translation with these diverse translations could bring a significant improvement in performance on translation tasks. An auxiliary experiment of conversation response generation task proves the effect of diversity as well.

scholarly journals Recurrent Stacking of Layers for Compact Neural Machine Translation Models

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 6292-6299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raj Dabre ◽  
Atsushi Fujita
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Single Layer ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Sequence Generation ◽  
Sequence Modeling ◽  
Back Translation

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.

scholarly journals A Joint Back-Translation and Transfer Learning Method for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Gong-Xu Luo ◽  
Ya-Ting Yang ◽  
Rui Dong ◽  
Yan-Hong Chen ◽  
Wen-Bo Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Transfer Learning ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Data Augmentation ◽  
Training Methods ◽  
Learning Method ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Parallel Data ◽  
Back Translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) for low-resource languages has drawn great attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose a joint back-translation and transfer learning method for low-resource languages. It is widely recognized that data augmentation methods and transfer learning methods are both straight forward and effective ways for low-resource problems. However, existing methods, which utilize one of these methods alone, limit the capacity of NMT models for low-resource problems. In order to make full use of the advantages of existing methods and further improve the translation performance of low-resource languages, we propose a new method to perfectly integrate the back-translation method with mainstream transfer learning architectures, which can not only initialize the NMT model by transferring parameters of the pretrained models, but also generate synthetic parallel data by translating large-scale monolingual data of the target side to boost the fluency of translations. We conduct experiments to explore the effectiveness of the joint method by incorporating back-translation into the parent-child and the hierarchical transfer learning architecture. In addition, different preprocessing and training methods are explored to get better performance. Experimental results on Uygur-Chinese and Turkish-English translation demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the baselines that use single methods.

scholarly journals Synchronous Bidirectional Neural Machine Translation

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 91-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Long Zhou ◽  
Jiajun Zhang ◽  
Chengqing Zong
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Single Model ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
German Translation ◽  
Transformer Model ◽  
Target Side ◽  
Future Information

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

scholarly journals Empirical Investigation of Optimization Algorithms in Neural Machine Translation

2017 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Parnia Bahar ◽  
Tamer Alkhouli ◽  
Jan-Thorsten Peter ◽  
Christopher Jan-Steffen Brix ◽  
Hermann Ney
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Optimization Problem ◽  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Optimization Techniques ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
And Training ◽  
Dimensional Optimization

AbstractTraining neural networks is a non-convex and a high-dimensional optimization problem. In this paper, we provide a comparative study of the most popular stochastic optimization techniques used to train neural networks. We evaluate the methods in terms of convergence speed, translation quality, and training stability. In addition, we investigate combinations that seek to improve optimization in terms of these aspects. We train state-of-the-art attention-based models and apply them to perform neural machine translation. We demonstrate our results on two tasks: WMT 2016 En→Ro and WMT 2015 De→En.

scholarly journals Dynamically Shaping the Reordering Search Space of Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 327-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arianna Bisazza ◽  
Marcello Federico
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Search Space ◽  
Input Word ◽  
Binary Classifier ◽  
Crucial Issue ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Very High

Defining the reordering search space is a crucial issue in phrase-based SMT between distant languages. In fact, the optimal trade-off between accuracy and complexity of decoding is nowadays reached by harshly limiting the input permutation space. We propose a method to dynamically shape such space and, thus, capture long-range word movements without hurting translation quality nor decoding time. The space defined by loose reordering constraints is dynamically pruned through a binary classifier that predicts whether a given input word should be translated right after another. The integration of this model into a phrase-based decoder improves a strong Arabic-English baseline already including state-of-the-art early distortion cost (Moore and Quirk, 2007) and hierarchical phrase orientation models (Galley and Manning, 2008). Significant improvements in the reordering of verbs are achieved by a system that is notably faster than the baseline, while bleu and meteor remain stable, or even increase, at a very high distortion limit.

scholarly journals Modeling Coherence for Discourse Neural Machine Translation

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 7338-7345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Xiong ◽  
Zhongjun He ◽  
Hua Wu ◽  
Haifeng Wang
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Discourse Coherence ◽  
Baseline System

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.

scholarly journals A SYSTEMATIC READING IN STATISTICAL TRANSLATION: FROM THE STATISTICAL MACHINE TRANSLATION TO THE NEURAL TRANSLATION MODELS.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zakaria El Maazouzi ◽  
Badr Eddine EL Mohajir ◽  
Mohammed Al Achhab
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
High Accuracy ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Automatic Translation

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.  

scholarly journals Towards a Better Integration of Fuzzy Matches in Neural Machine Translation through Data Augmentation

Informatics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Arda Tezcan ◽  
Bram Bulté ◽  
Bram Vanroy
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Data Augmentation ◽  
Sentence Length ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Combination Technique ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Fuzzy Match ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Matching Techniques

We identify a number of aspects that can boost the performance of Neural Fuzzy Repair (NFR), an easy-to-implement method to integrate translation memory matches and neural machine translation (NMT). We explore various ways of maximising the added value of retrieved matches within the NFR paradigm for eight language combinations, using Transformer NMT systems. In particular, we test the impact of different fuzzy matching techniques, sub-word-level segmentation methods and alignment-based features on overall translation quality. Furthermore, we propose a fuzzy match combination technique that aims to maximise the coverage of source words. This is supplemented with an analysis of how translation quality is affected by input sentence length and fuzzy match score. The results show that applying a combination of the tested modifications leads to a significant increase in estimated translation quality over all baselines for all language combinations.

Backward and trigger-based language models for statistical machine translation

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEYI XIONG ◽  
MIN ZHANG
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Information ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Language Model ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Knowledge Sources ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Translation Quality

AbstractThe language model is one of the most important knowledge sources for statistical machine translation. In this article, we present two extensions to standard n-gram language models in statistical machine translation: a backward language model that augments the conventional forward language model, and a mutual information trigger model which captures long-distance dependencies that go beyond the scope of standard n-gram language models. We introduce algorithms to integrate the two proposed models into two kinds of state-of-the-art phrase-based decoders. Our experimental results on Chinese/Spanish/Vietnamese-to-English show that both models are able to significantly improve translation quality in terms of BLEU and METEOR over a competitive baseline.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document