No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we propose a new adversarial augmentation method for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The main idea is to minimize the vicinal risk over virtual sentences sampled from two vicinity distributions, of which the crucial one is a novel vicinity distribution for adversarial sentences that describes a smooth interpolated embedding space centered around observed training sentence pairs. We then discuss our approach, AdvAug, to train NMT models using the embeddings of virtual sentences in sequence-to-sequence learning. Experiments on Chinese-English, English-French, and English-German translation benchmarks show that AdvAug achieves significant improvements over the Transformer (up to 4.9 BLEU points), and substantially outperforms other data augmentation techniques (e.g. back-translation) without using extra corpora.
Exposing diverse subword segmentations to neural machine translation (NMT) models often improves the robustness of machine translation as NMT models can experience various subword candidates. However, the diversification of subword segmentations mostly relies on the pre-trained subword language models from which erroneous segmentations of unseen words are less likely to be sampled. In this paper, we present adversarial subword regularization (ADVSR) to study whether gradient signals during training can be a substitute criterion for exposing diverse subword segmentations. We experimentally show that our model-based adversarial samples effectively encourage NMT models to be less sensitive to segmentation errors and improve the performance of NMT models in low-resource and out-domain datasets.
Neural machine translation (NMT) often suffers from the vulnerability to noisy perturbations in the input. We propose an approach to improving the robustness of NMT models, which consists of two parts: (1) attack the translation model with adversarial source examples; (2) defend the translation model with adversarial target inputs to improve its robustness against the adversarial source inputs.For the generation of adversarial inputs, we propose a gradient-based method to craft adversarial examples informed by the translation loss over the clean inputs.Experimental results on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements ($2.8$ and $1.6$ BLEU points) over Transformer on standard clean benchmarks as well as exhibiting higher robustness on noisy data.
Unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) has recently attracted great interest in the machine translation community. The main advantage of the UNMT lies in its easy collection of required large training text sentences while with only a slightly worse performance than supervised neural machine translation which requires expensive annotated translation pairs on some translation tasks. In most studies, the UMNT is trained with clean data without considering its robustness to the noisy data. However, in real-world scenarios, there usually exists noise in the collected input sentences which degrades the performance of the translation system since the UNMT is sensitive to the small perturbations of the input sentences. In this paper, we first time explicitly take the noisy data into consideration to improve the robustness of the UNMT based systems. First of all, we clearly defined two types of noises in training sentences, i.e., word noise and word order noise, and empirically investigate its effect in the UNMT, then we propose adversarial training methods with denoising process in the UNMT. Experimental results on several language pairs show that our proposed methods substantially improved the robustness of the conventional UNMT systems in noisy scenarios.
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have demonstrated strong state of the art performance on translation tasks where well-formed training and evaluation data are provided, but they remain sensitive to inputs that include errors of various types. Specifically, in the context of long-form speech translation systems, where the input transcripts come from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), the NMT models have to handle errors including phoneme substitutions, grammatical structure, and sentence boundaries, all of which pose challenges to NMT robustness. Through in-depth error analysis, we show that sentence boundary segmentation has the largest impact on quality, and we develop a simple data augmentation strategy to improve segmentation robustness.
As a sequence-to-sequence generation task, neural machine translation (NMT) naturally contains intrinsic uncertainty, where a single sentence in one language has multiple valid counterparts in the other. However, the dominant methods for NMT only observe one of them from the parallel corpora for the model training but have to deal with adequate variations under the same meaning at inference. This leads to a discrepancy of the data distribution between the training and the inference phases. To address this problem, we propose uncertainty-aware semantic augmentation, which explicitly captures the universal semantic information among multiple semantically-equivalent source sentences and enhances the hidden representations with this information for better translations. Extensive experiments on various translation tasks reveal that our approach significantly outperforms the strong baselines and the existing methods.