No Arabic abstract
Discourse context has been proven useful when translating documents. It is quite a challenge to incorporate long document context in the prevailing neural machine translation models such as Transformer. In this paper, we propose multi-resolutional (MR) Doc2Doc, a method to train a neural sequence-to-sequence model for document-level translation. Our trained model can simultaneously translate sentence by sentence as well as a document as a whole. We evaluate our method and several recent approaches on nine document-level datasets and two sentence-level datasets across six languages. Experiments show that MR Doc2Doc outperforms sentence-level models and previous methods in a comprehensive set of metrics, including BLEU, four lexical indices, three newly proposed assistant linguistic indicators, and human evaluation.
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.
Document-level MT models are still far from satisfactory. Existing work extend translation unit from single sentence to multiple sentences. However, study shows that when we further enlarge the translation unit to a whole document, supervised training of Transformer can fail. In this paper, we find such failure is not caused by overfitting, but by sticking around local minima during training. Our analysis shows that the increased complexity of target-to-source attention is a reason for the failure. As a solution, we propose G-Transformer, introducing locality assumption as an inductive bias into Transformer, reducing the hypothesis space of the attention from target to source. Experiments show that G-Transformer converges faster and more stably than Transformer, achieving new state-of-the-art BLEU scores for both non-pretraining and pre-training settings on three benchmark datasets.
Document-level machine translation conditions on surrounding sentences to produce coherent translations. There has been much recent work in this area with the introduction of custom model architectures and decoding algorithms. This paper presents a systematic comparison of selected approaches from the literature on two benchmarks for which document-level phenomena evaluation suites exist. We find that a simple method based purely on back-translating monolingual document-level data performs as well as much more elaborate alternatives, both in terms of document-level metrics as well as human evaluation.
We show that Bayes rule provides an effective mechanism for creating document translation models that can be learned from only parallel sentences and monolingual documents---a compelling benefit as parallel documents are not always available. In our formulation, the posterior probability of a candidate translation is the product of the unconditional (prior) probability of the candidate output document and the reverse translation probability of translating the candidate output back into the source language. Our proposed model uses a powerful autoregressive language model as the prior on target language documents, but it assumes that each sentence is translated independently from the target to the source language. Crucially, at test time, when a source document is observed, the document language model prior induces dependencies between the translations of the source sentences in the posterior. The models independence assumption not only enables efficient use of available data, but it additionally admits a practical left-to-right beam-search algorithm for carrying out inference. Experiments show that our model benefits from using cross-sentence context in the language model, and it outperforms existing document translation approaches.
Context modeling is essential to generate coherent and consistent translation for Document-level Neural Machine Translations. The widely used method for document-level translation usually compresses the context information into a representation via hierarchical attention networks. However, this method neither considers the relationship between context words nor distinguishes the roles of context words. To address this problem, we propose a query-guided capsule networks to cluster context information into different perspectives from which the target translation may concern. Experiment results show that our method can significantly outperform strong baselines on multiple data sets of different domains.