No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we study the problem of enabling neural machine translation (NMT) to reuse previous translations from similar examples in target prediction. Distinguishing reusable translations from noisy segments and learning to reuse them in NMT are non-trivial. To solve these challenges, we propose an Example-Guided NMT (EGNMT) framework with two models: (1) a noise-masked encoder model that masks out noisy words according to word alignments and encodes the noise-masked sentences with an additional example encoder and (2) an auxiliary decoder model that predicts reusable words via an auxiliary decoder sharing parameters with the primary decoder. We define and implement the two models with the state-of-the-art Transformer. Experiments show that the noise-masked encoder model allows NMT to learn useful information from examples with low fuzzy match scores (FMS) while the auxiliary decoder model is good for high-FMS examples. More experiments on Chinese-English, English-German and English-Spanish translation demonstrate that the combination of the two EGNMT models can achieve improvements of up to +9 BLEU points over the baseline system and +7 BLEU points over a two-encoder Transformer.
Although teacher forcing has become the main training paradigm for neural machine translation, it usually makes predictions only conditioned on past information, and hence lacks global planning for the future. To address this problem, we introduce another decoder, called seer decoder, into the encoder-decoder framework during training, which involves future information in target predictions. Meanwhile, we force the conventional decoder to simulate the behaviors of the seer decoder via knowledge distillation. In this way, at test the conventional decoder can perform like the seer decoder without the attendance of it. Experiment results on the Chinese-English, English-German and English-Romanian translation tasks show our method can outperform competitive baselines significantly and achieves greater improvements on the bigger data sets. Besides, the experiments also prove knowledge distillation the best way to transfer knowledge from the seer decoder to the conventional decoder compared to adversarial learning and L2 regularization.
Large-scale training datasets lie at the core of the recent success of neural machine translation (NMT) models. However, the complex patterns and potential noises in the large-scale data make training NMT models difficult. In this work, we explore to identify the inactive training examples which contribute less to the model performance, and show that the existence of inactive examples depends on the data distribution. We further introduce data rejuvenation to improve the training of NMT models on large-scale datasets by exploiting inactive examples. The proposed framework consists of three phases. First, we train an identification model on the original training data, and use it to distinguish inactive examples and active examples by their sentence-level output probabilities. Then, we train a rejuvenation model on the active examples, which is used to re-label the inactive examples with forward-translation. Finally, the rejuvenated examples and the active examples are combined to train the final NMT model. Experimental results on WMT14 English-German and English-French datasets show that the proposed data rejuvenation consistently and significantly improves performance for several strong NMT models. Extensive analyses reveal that our approach stabilizes and accelerates the training process of NMT models, resulting in final models with better generalization capability.
Neural machine translation (NMT) models generally adopt an encoder-decoder architecture for modeling the entire translation process. The encoder summarizes the representation of input sentence from scratch, which is potentially a problem if the sentence is ambiguous. When translating a text, humans often create an initial understanding of the source sentence and then incrementally refine it along the translation on the target side. Starting from this intuition, we propose a novel encoder-refiner-decoder framework, which dynamically refines the source representations based on the generated target-side information at each decoding step. Since the refining operations are time-consuming, we propose a strategy, leveraging the power of reinforcement learning models, to decide when to refine at specific decoding steps. Experimental results on both Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks show that the proposed approach significantly and consistently improves translation performance over the standard encoder-decoder framework. Furthermore, when refining strategy is applied, results still show reasonable improvement over the baseline without much decrease in decoding speed.
Prior work has proved that Translation memory (TM) can boost the performance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT). In contrast to existing work that uses bilingual corpus as TM and employs source-side similarity search for memory retrieval, we propose a new framework that uses monolingual memory and performs learnable memory retrieval in a cross-lingual manner. Our framework has unique advantages. First, the cross-lingual memory retriever allows abundant monolingual data to be TM. Second, the memory retriever and NMT model can be jointly optimized for the ultimate translation goal. Experiments show that the proposed method obtains substantial improvements. Remarkably, it even outperforms strong TM-augmented NMT baselines using bilingual TM. Owning to the ability to leverage monolingual data, our model also demonstrates effectiveness in low-resource and domain adaptation scenarios.
In this paper, we propose Neural Phrase-to-Phrase Machine Translation (NP$^2$MT). Our model uses a phrase attention mechanism to discover relevant input (source) segments that are used by a decoder to generate output (target) phrases. We also design an efficient dynamic programming algorithm to decode segments that allows the model to be trained faster than the existing neural phrase-based machine translation method by Huang et al. (2018). Furthermore, our method can naturally integrate with external phrase dictionaries during decoding. Empirical experiments show that our method achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the art methods on benchmark datasets. However, when the training and testing data are from different distributions or domains, our method performs better.