In neural machine translation, a source sequence of words is encoded into a vector from which a target sequence is generated in the decoding phase. Differently from statistical machine translation, the associations between source words and their possible target counterparts are not explicitly stored. Source and target words are at the two ends of a long information processing procedure, mediated by hidden states at both the source encoding and the target decoding phases. This makes it possible that a source word is incorrectly translated into a target word that is not any of its admissible equivalent counterparts in the target language. In this paper, we seek to somewhat shorten the distance between source and target words in that procedure, and thus strengthen their association, by means of a method we term bridging source and target word embeddings. We experiment with three strategies: (1) a source-side bridging model, where source word embeddings are moved one step closer to the output target sequence; (2) a target-side bridging model, which explores the more relevant source word embeddings for the prediction of the target sequence; and (3) a direct bridging model, which directly connects source and target word embeddings seeking to minimize errors in the translation of ones by the others. Experiments and analysis presented in this paper demonstrate that the proposed bridging models are able to significantly improve quality of both sentence translation, in general, and alignment and translation of individual source words with target words, in particular.
This work investigates the alignment problem in state-of-the-art multi-head attention models based on the transformer architecture. We demonstrate that alignment extraction in transformer models can be improved by augmenting an additional alignment head to the multi-head source-to-target attention component. This is used to compute sharper attention weights. We describe how to use the alignment head to achieve competitive performance. To study the effect of adding the alignment head, we simulate a dictionary-guided translation task, where the user wants to guide translation using pre-defined dictionary entries. Using the proposed approach, we achieve up to $3.8$ % BLEU improvement when using the dictionary, in comparison to $2.4$ % BLEU in the baseline case. We also propose alignment pruning to speed up decoding in alignment-based neural machine translation (ANMT), which speeds up translation by a factor of $1.8$ without loss in translation performance. We carry out experiments on the shared WMT 2016 English$\to$Romanian news task and the BOLT Chinese$\to$English discussion forum task.
Machine translation systems achieve near human-level performance on some languages, yet their effectiveness strongly relies on the availability of large amounts of parallel sentences, which hinders their applicability to the majority of language pairs. This work investigates how to learn to translate when having access to only large monolingual corpora in each language. We propose two model variants, a neural and a phrase-based model. Both versions leverage a careful initialization of the parameters, the denoising effect of language models and automatic generation of parallel data by iterative back-translation. These models are significantly better than methods from the literature, while being simpler and having fewer hyper-parameters. On the widely used WMT'14 English-French and WMT'16 German-English benchmarks, our models respectively obtain 28.1 and 25.2 BLEU points without using a single parallel sentence, outperforming the state of the art by more than 11 BLEU points. On low-resource languages like English-Urdu and English-Romanian, our methods achieve even better results than semi-supervised and supervised approaches leveraging the paucity of available bitexts. Our code for NMT and PBSMT is publicly available.
Multi-source translation is an approach to exploit multiple inputs (e.g. in two different languages) to increase translation accuracy. In this paper, we examine approaches for multi-source neural machine translation (NMT) using an incomplete multilingual corpus in which some translations are missing. In practice, many multilingual corpora are not complete due to the difficulty to provide translations in all of the relevant languages (for example, in TED talks, most English talks only have subtitles for a small portion of the languages that TED supports). Existing studies on multi-source translation did not explicitly handle such situations. This study focuses on the use of incomplete multilingual corpora in multi-encoder NMT and mixture of NMT experts and examines a very simple implementation where missing source translations are replaced by a special symbol <NULL>. These methods allow us to use incomplete corpora both at training time and test time. In experiments with real incomplete multilingual corpora of TED Talks, the multi-source NMT with the <NULL> tokens achieved higher translation accuracies measured by BLEU than those by any one-to-one NMT systems.
Machine translation systems require semantic knowledge and grammatical understanding. Neural machine translation (NMT) systems often assume this information is captured by an attention mechanism and a decoder that ensures fluency. Recent work has shown that incorporating explicit syntax alleviates the burden of modeling both types of knowledge. However, requiring parses is expensive and does not explore the question of what syntax a model needs during translation. To address both of these issues we introduce a model that simultaneously translates while inducing dependency trees. In this way, we leverage the benefits of structure while investigating what syntax NMT must induce to maximize performance. We show that our dependency trees are 1. language pair dependent and 2. improve translation quality.
Recently, neural machine translation (NMT) has emerged as a powerful alternative to conventional statistical approaches. However, its performance drops considerably in the presence of morphologically rich languages (MRLs). Neural engines usually fail to tackle the large vocabulary and high out-of-vocabulary (OOV) word rate of MRLs. Therefore, it is not suitable to exploit existing word-based models to translate this set of languages. In this paper, we propose an extension to the state-of-the-art model of Chung et al. (2016), which works at the character level and boosts the decoder with target-side morphological information. In our architecture, an additional morphology table is plugged into the model. Each time the decoder samples from a target vocabulary, the table sends auxiliary signals from the most relevant affixes in order to enrich the decoder's current state and constrain it to provide better predictions. We evaluated our model to translate English into German, Russian, and Turkish as three MRLs and observed significant improvements.
Neural machine translation (NMT) has been a new paradigm in machine translation, and the attention mechanism has become the dominant approach with the state-of-the-art records in many language pairs. While there are variants of the attention mechanism, all of them use only temporal attention where one scalar value is assigned to one context vector corresponding to a source word. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained (or 2D) attention mechanism where each dimension of a context vector will receive a separate attention score. In experiments with the task of En-De and En-Fi translation, the fine-grained attention method improves the translation quality in terms of BLEU score. In addition, our alignment analysis reveals how the fine-grained attention mechanism exploits the internal structure of context vectors.
Homographs, words with different meanings but the same surface form, have long caused difficulty for machine translation systems, as it is difficult to select the correct translation based on the context. However, with the advent of neural machine translation (NMT) systems, which can theoretically take into account global sentential context, one may hypothesize that this problem has been alleviated. In this paper, we first provide empirical evidence that existing NMT systems in fact still have significant problems in properly translating ambiguous words. We then proceed to describe methods, inspired by the word sense disambiguation literature, that model the context of the input word with context-aware word embeddings that help to differentiate the word sense be- fore feeding it into the encoder. Experiments on three language pairs demonstrate that such models improve the performance of NMT systems both in terms of BLEU score and in the accuracy of translating homographs.
Monolingual data have been demonstrated to be helpful in improving translation quality of both statistical machine translation (SMT) systems and neural machine translation (NMT) systems, especially in resource-poor or domain adaptation tasks where parallel data are not rich enough. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to better leveraging monolingual data for neural machine translation by jointly learning source-to-target and target-to-source NMT models for a language pair with a joint EM optimization method. The training process starts with two initial NMT models pre-trained on parallel data for each direction, and these two models are iteratively updated by incrementally decreasing translation losses on training data. In each iteration step, both NMT models are first used to translate monolingual data from one language to the other, forming pseudo-training data of the other NMT model. Then two new NMT models are learnt from parallel data together with the pseudo training data. Both NMT models are expected to be improved and better pseudo-training data can be generated in next step. Experiment results on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks show that our approach can simultaneously improve translation quality of source-to-target and target-to-source models, significantly outperforming strong baseline systems which are enhanced with monolingual data for model training including back-translation.
In this paper, we present Neural Phrase-based Machine Translation (NPMT). Our method explicitly models the phrase structures in output sequences using Sleep-WAke Networks (SWAN), a recently proposed segmentation-based sequence modeling method. To mitigate the monotonic alignment requirement of SWAN, we introduce a new layer to perform (soft) local reordering of input sequences. Different from existing neural machine translation (NMT) approaches, NPMT does not use attention-based decoding mechanisms. Instead, it directly outputs phrases in a sequential order and can decode in linear time. Our experiments show that NPMT achieves superior performances on IWSLT 2014 German-English/English-German and IWSLT 2015 English-Vietnamese machine translation tasks compared with strong NMT baselines. We also observe that our method produces meaningful phrases in output languages.
Neural machine translation (NMT) suffers a performance deficiency when a limited vocabulary fails to cover the source or target side adequately, which happens frequently when dealing with morphologically rich languages. To address this problem, previous work focused on adjusting translation granularity or expanding the vocabulary size. However, morphological information is relatively under-considered in NMT architectures, which may further improve translation quality. We propose a novel method, which can not only reduce data sparsity but also model morphology through a simple but effective mechanism. By predicting the stem and suffix separately during decoding, our system achieves an improvement of up to 1.98 BLEU compared with previous work on English to Russian translation. Our method is orthogonal to different NMT architectures and stably gains improvements on various domains.