No Arabic abstract
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.
Existing neural machine translation (NMT) systems utilize sequence-to-sequence neural networks to generate target translation word by word, and then make the generated word at each time-step and the counterpart in the references as consistent as possible. However, the trained translation model tends to focus on ensuring the accuracy of the generated target word at the current time-step and does not consider its future cost which means the expected cost of generating the subsequent target translation (i.e., the next target word). To respond to this issue, we propose a simple and effective method to model the future cost of each target word for NMT systems. In detail, a time-dependent future cost is estimated based on the current generated target word and its contextual information to boost the training of the NMT model. Furthermore, the learned future context representation at the current time-step is used to help the generation of the next target word in the decoding. Experimental results on three widely-used translation datasets, including the WMT14 German-to-English, WMT14 English-to-French, and WMT17 Chinese-to-English, show that the proposed approach achieves significant improvements over strong Transformer-based NMT baseline.
Previous work on neural noisy channel modeling relied on latent variable models that incrementally process the source and target sentence. This makes decoding decisions based on partial source prefixes even though the full source is available. We pursue an alternative approach based on standard sequence to sequence models which utilize the entire source. These models perform remarkably well as channel models, even though they have neither been trained on, nor designed to factor over incomplete target sentences. Experiments with neural language models trained on billions of words show that noisy channel models can outperform a direct model by up to 3.2 BLEU on WMT17 German-English translation. We evaluate on four language-pairs and our channel models consistently outperform strong alternatives such right-to-left reranking models and ensembles of direct models.
Cross-attention is an important component of neural machine translation (NMT), which is always realized by dot-product attention in previous methods. However, dot-product attention only considers the pair-wise correlation between words, resulting in dispersion when dealing with long sentences and neglect of source neighboring relationships. Inspired by linguistics, the above issues are caused by ignoring a type of cross-attention, called concentrated attention, which focuses on several central words and then spreads around them. In this work, we apply Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to model the concentrated attention in cross-attention. Experiments and analyses we conducted on three datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline and has significant improvement on alignment quality, N-gram accuracy, and long sentence translation.
In Transformer-based neural machine translation (NMT), the positional encoding mechanism helps the self-attention networks to learn the source representation with order dependency, which makes the Transformer-based NMT achieve state-of-the-art results for various translation tasks. However, Transformer-based NMT only adds representations of positions sequentially to word vectors in the input sentence and does not explicitly consider reordering information in this sentence. In this paper, we first empirically investigate the relationship between source reordering information and translation performance. The empirical findings show that the source input with the target order learned from the bilingual parallel dataset can substantially improve translation performance. Thus, we propose a novel reordering method to explicitly model this reordering information for the Transformer-based NMT. The empirical results on the WMT14 English-to-German, WAT ASPEC Japanese-to-English, and WMT17 Chinese-to-English translation tasks show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Previous works have shown that contextual information can improve the performance of neural machine translation (NMT). However, most existing document-level NMT methods only consider a few number of previous sentences. How to make use of the whole document as global contexts is still a challenge. To address this issue, we hypothesize that a document can be represented as a graph that connects relevant contexts regardless of their distances. We employ several types of relations, including adjacency, syntactic dependency, lexical consistency, and coreference, to construct the document graph. Then, we incorporate both source and target graphs into the conventional Transformer architecture with graph convolutional networks. Experiments on various NMT benchmarks, including IWSLT English--French, Chinese-English, WMT English--German and Opensubtitle English--Russian, demonstrate that using document graphs can significantly improve the translation quality. Extensive analysis verifies that the document graph is beneficial for capturing discourse phenomena.