Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation:...

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Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation University of Edinburgh October 29 2016 Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 1 / 38

Transcript of Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation:...

Page 1: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Neural Machine Translation:Breaking the Performance Plateau

Rico Sennrich

Institute for Language, Cognition and ComputationUniversity of Edinburgh

October 29 2016

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Page 2: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Edinburgh’s* WMT results over the years

2013 2014 2015 20160.0

10.0

20.0

30.0

20.3 20.9 20.8 21.519.4 20.2

22.0 22.1

18.9

24.7

BLE

Uon

new

stes

t201

3(E

N→

DE

)

phrase-based SMTsyntax-based SMTneural MT

*NMT 2015 from U. Montréal: https://sites.google.com/site/acl16nmt/

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Edinburgh’s* WMT results over the years

2013 2014 2015 20160.0

10.0

20.0

30.0

20.3 20.9 20.8 21.519.4 20.2

22.0 22.1

18.9

24.7

BLE

Uon

new

stes

t201

3(E

N→

DE

)

phrase-based SMTsyntax-based SMTneural MT

*NMT 2015 from U. Montréal: https://sites.google.com/site/acl16nmt/

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 1 / 38

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Edinburgh’s* WMT results over the years

2013 2014 2015 20160.0

10.0

20.0

30.0

20.3 20.9 20.8 21.519.4 20.2

22.0 22.1

18.9

24.7

BLE

Uon

new

stes

t201

3(E

N→

DE

)

phrase-based SMTsyntax-based SMTneural MT

*NMT 2015 from U. Montréal: https://sites.google.com/site/acl16nmt/

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 1 / 38

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Edinburgh’s* WMT results over the years

2013 2014 2015 20160.0

10.0

20.0

30.0

20.3 20.9 20.8 21.519.4 20.2

22.0 22.1

18.9

24.7

BLE

Uon

new

stes

t201

3(E

N→

DE

)

phrase-based SMTsyntax-based SMTneural MT

*NMT 2015 from U. Montréal: https://sites.google.com/site/acl16nmt/

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 1 / 38

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Edinburgh’s* WMT results over the years

2013 2014 2015 20160.0

10.0

20.0

30.0

20.3 20.9 20.8 21.519.4 20.2

22.0 22.1

18.9

24.7

BLE

Uon

new

stes

t201

3(E

N→

DE

)

phrase-based SMTsyntax-based SMTneural MT

*NMT 2015 from U. Montréal: https://sites.google.com/site/acl16nmt/

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Neural Machine Translation

1 Recent advances in neural MT

2 Towards using neural MT in productionthings that are suddenly easy(er)things that are suddenly hard(er)things that are still hard

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Neural Machine Translation [Bahdanau et al., 2015]

Kyunghyun Chohttp://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/introduction-neural-machine-translation-gpus-part-3/

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Recent advances in neural MT

Some problemsnetworks have fixed vocabulary→ poor translation of rare/unknown words

models are trained on parallel data; how do we use monolingual data?

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Problem with word-level models

they charge a carry-on bag fee.sie erheben eine Handgepäckgebühr.

Neural MT architectures have small and fixed vocabularytranslation is an open-vocabulary problem

productive word formation (example: compounding)names (may require transliteration)numbers, URLs etc.

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Why subword units?

transparent translationssome translations are semantically/phonologically transparentmorphologically complex words (e.g. compounds):

solar system (English)Sonnen|system (German)Nap|rendszer (Hungarian)

named entities:Obama(English; German)Îáàìà (Russian)オバマ (o-ba-ma) (Japanese)

cognates and loanwords:claustrophobia(English)Klaustrophobie(German)Êëàóñòðîôîáèÿ (Russian)

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Choice of subword unit

characters?→ works, but inefficient(recent work on increasing efficiency [Lee et al., 2016])

algorithms employed in SMT? (finite-state morphology; Morfessor)→ no control over symbol vocabulary

byte pair encoding (BPE)compression algorithm adapted to word segmentation

frequency-based

single hyperparameter which controls symbol vocabulary size

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Byte pair encoding for word segmentation

bottom-up character mergingiteratively replace most frequent pair of symbols (’A’,’B’) with ’AB’

apply on dictionary, not on full text (for efficiency)

output vocabulary: character vocabulary + one symbol per merge

word freq’l o w </w>’ 5’l o w e r </w>’ 2’n e w e s t </w>’ 6’w i d e s t </w>’ 3

freq symbol pair new symbol

9 (’e’, ’s’) → ’es’9 (’es’, ’t’) → ’est’9 (’est’, ’</w>’) → ’est</w>’7 (’l’, ’o’) → ’lo’7 (’lo’, ’w’) → ’low’...

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 8 / 38

Page 14: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Byte pair encoding for word segmentation

bottom-up character mergingiteratively replace most frequent pair of symbols (’A’,’B’) with ’AB’

apply on dictionary, not on full text (for efficiency)

output vocabulary: character vocabulary + one symbol per merge

word freq’l o w </w>’ 5’l o w e r </w>’ 2’n e w es t </w>’ 6’w i d es t </w>’ 3

freq symbol pair new symbol9 (’e’, ’s’) → ’es’

9 (’es’, ’t’) → ’est’9 (’est’, ’</w>’) → ’est</w>’7 (’l’, ’o’) → ’lo’7 (’lo’, ’w’) → ’low’...

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Page 15: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Byte pair encoding for word segmentation

bottom-up character mergingiteratively replace most frequent pair of symbols (’A’,’B’) with ’AB’

apply on dictionary, not on full text (for efficiency)

output vocabulary: character vocabulary + one symbol per merge

word freq’l o w </w>’ 5’l o w e r </w>’ 2’n e w est </w>’ 6’w i d est </w>’ 3

freq symbol pair new symbol9 (’e’, ’s’) → ’es’9 (’es’, ’t’) → ’est’

9 (’est’, ’</w>’) → ’est</w>’7 (’l’, ’o’) → ’lo’7 (’lo’, ’w’) → ’low’...

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 8 / 38

Page 16: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Byte pair encoding for word segmentation

bottom-up character mergingiteratively replace most frequent pair of symbols (’A’,’B’) with ’AB’

apply on dictionary, not on full text (for efficiency)

output vocabulary: character vocabulary + one symbol per merge

word freq’l o w </w>’ 5’l o w e r </w>’ 2’n e w est</w>’ 6’w i d est</w>’ 3

freq symbol pair new symbol9 (’e’, ’s’) → ’es’9 (’es’, ’t’) → ’est’9 (’est’, ’</w>’) → ’est</w>’

7 (’l’, ’o’) → ’lo’7 (’lo’, ’w’) → ’low’...

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 8 / 38

Page 17: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Byte pair encoding for word segmentation

bottom-up character mergingiteratively replace most frequent pair of symbols (’A’,’B’) with ’AB’

apply on dictionary, not on full text (for efficiency)

output vocabulary: character vocabulary + one symbol per merge

word freq’lo w </w>’ 5’lo w e r </w>’ 2’n e w est</w>’ 6’w i d est</w>’ 3

freq symbol pair new symbol9 (’e’, ’s’) → ’es’9 (’es’, ’t’) → ’est’9 (’est’, ’</w>’) → ’est</w>’7 (’l’, ’o’) → ’lo’

7 (’lo’, ’w’) → ’low’...

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 8 / 38

Page 18: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Byte pair encoding for word segmentation

bottom-up character mergingiteratively replace most frequent pair of symbols (’A’,’B’) with ’AB’

apply on dictionary, not on full text (for efficiency)

output vocabulary: character vocabulary + one symbol per merge

word freq’low </w>’ 5’low e r </w>’ 2’n e w est</w>’ 6’w i d est</w>’ 3

freq symbol pair new symbol9 (’e’, ’s’) → ’es’9 (’es’, ’t’) → ’est’9 (’est’, ’</w>’) → ’est</w>’7 (’l’, ’o’) → ’lo’7 (’lo’, ’w’) → ’low’...

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Byte pair encoding for word segmentation

why BPE?open-vocabulary:learned operations can be applied to unknown words

don’t waste time on frequent character sequences→ trade-off between text length and vocabulary size

alternative view: character-level model on compressed text

’l o w e s t </w>’

(’e’, ’s’) → ’es’(’es’, ’t’) → ’est’(’est’, ’</w>’) → ’est</w>’(’l’, ’o’) → ’lo’(’lo’, ’w’) → ’low’

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Page 20: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Byte pair encoding for word segmentation

why BPE?open-vocabulary:learned operations can be applied to unknown words

don’t waste time on frequent character sequences→ trade-off between text length and vocabulary size

alternative view: character-level model on compressed text

’l o w es t </w>’

(’e’, ’s’) → ’es’(’es’, ’t’) → ’est’(’est’, ’</w>’) → ’est</w>’(’l’, ’o’) → ’lo’(’lo’, ’w’) → ’low’

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Page 21: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Byte pair encoding for word segmentation

why BPE?open-vocabulary:learned operations can be applied to unknown words

don’t waste time on frequent character sequences→ trade-off between text length and vocabulary size

alternative view: character-level model on compressed text

’l o w est </w>’

(’e’, ’s’) → ’es’(’es’, ’t’) → ’est’(’est’, ’</w>’) → ’est</w>’(’l’, ’o’) → ’lo’(’lo’, ’w’) → ’low’

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 9 / 38

Page 22: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Byte pair encoding for word segmentation

why BPE?open-vocabulary:learned operations can be applied to unknown words

don’t waste time on frequent character sequences→ trade-off between text length and vocabulary size

alternative view: character-level model on compressed text

’l o w est</w>’

(’e’, ’s’) → ’es’(’es’, ’t’) → ’est’(’est’, ’</w>’) → ’est</w>’(’l’, ’o’) → ’lo’(’lo’, ’w’) → ’low’

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 9 / 38

Page 23: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Byte pair encoding for word segmentation

why BPE?open-vocabulary:learned operations can be applied to unknown words

don’t waste time on frequent character sequences→ trade-off between text length and vocabulary size

alternative view: character-level model on compressed text

’lo w est</w>’

(’e’, ’s’) → ’es’(’es’, ’t’) → ’est’(’est’, ’</w>’) → ’est</w>’(’l’, ’o’) → ’lo’(’lo’, ’w’) → ’low’

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 9 / 38

Page 24: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Byte pair encoding for word segmentation

why BPE?open-vocabulary:learned operations can be applied to unknown words

don’t waste time on frequent character sequences→ trade-off between text length and vocabulary size

alternative view: character-level model on compressed text

’low est</w>’

(’e’, ’s’) → ’es’(’es’, ’t’) → ’est’(’est’, ’</w>’) → ’est</w>’(’l’, ’o’) → ’lo’(’lo’, ’w’) → ’low’

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Unigram F1 EN→DE

100 101 102 103 104 105 1060

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

150 000 500 000

training set frequency rank (German)

unig

ram

F1

word-level (no back-off)

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Unigram F1 EN→DE

100 101 102 103 104 105 1060

0.2

0.4

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150 000 500 000

training set frequency rank (German)

unig

ram

F1

word-level (with back-off)word-level (no back-off)

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Unigram F1 EN→DE

100 101 102 103 104 105 1060

0.2

0.4

0.6

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150 000 500 000

training set frequency rank (German)

unig

ram

F1

BPEword-level (with back-off)word-level (no back-off)

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Examples

system sentencesource health research institutesreference Gesundheitsforschungsinstituteword-level (with back-off) ForschungsinstituteBPE Gesundheits|forsch|ungsin|stitutesource rakfiskreference ðàêôèñêà (rakfiska)word-level (with back-off) rakfisk → UNK → rakfiskBPE rak|f|isk → ðàê|ô|èñêà (rak|f|iska)

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Monolingual training data

Why Monolingual Data for Phrase-based SMT?more training data 3

more appropriate training data (domain adaptation) 3

relax independence assumptions 3

Why Monolingual Data for NMT?more training data 3

more appropriate training data (domain adaptation) 3

relax independence assumptions 7

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Monolingual training data

Related work [Gülçehre et al., 2015]shallow fusion: rescore beam with language model

deep fusion: extra, LM-specific hidden layer

(a) Shallow Fusion (Sec. 4.1) (b) Deep Fusion (Sec. 4.2)

Figure 1: Graphical illustrations of the proposed fusion methods.

learned by the LM from monolingual corpora isnot overwritten. It is possible to use monolingualcorpora as well while finetuning all the parame-ters, but in this paper, we alter only the output pa-rameters in the stage of finetuning.

4.2.1 Balancing the LM and TMIn order for the decoder to flexibly balance the in-put from the LM and TM, we augment the decoderwith a “controller” mechanism. The need to flex-ibly balance the signals arises depending on thework being translated. For instance, in the caseof Zh-En, there are no Chinese words that corre-spond to articles in English, in which case the LMmay be more informative. On the other hand, ifa noun is to be translated, it may be better to ig-nore any signal from the LM, as it may prevent thedecoder from choosing the correct translation. In-tuitively, this mechanism helps the model dynami-cally weight the different models depending on theword being translated.

The controller mechanism is implemented as afunction taking the hidden state of the LM as inputand computing

gt = σ(v>g s

LMt + bg

), (7)

where σ is a logistic sigmoid function. vg and bgare learned parameters.

The output of the controller is then multipliedwith the hidden state of the LM. This lets the de-

coder use the signal from the TM fully, while thecontroller controls the magnitude of the LM sig-nal.

In our experiments, we empirically found that itwas better to initialize the bias bg to a small, neg-ative number. This allows the decoder to decidethe importance of the LM only when it is deemednecessary.

5 Datasets

We evaluate the proposed approaches on four di-verse tasks: Chinese to English (Zh-En), Turkishto English (Tr-En), German to English (De-En)and Czech to English (Cs-En). We describe eachof these datasets in more detail below.

5.1 Parallel Corpora

5.1.1 Zh-En: OpenMT’15We use the parallel corpora made availableas a part of the NIST OpenMT’15 Challenge.Sentence-aligned pairs from three domains arecombined to form a training set: (1) SMS/CHATand (2) conversational telephone speech (CTS)from DARPA BOLT Project, and (3) newsgroup-s/weblogs from DARPA GALE Project. In total,the training set consists of 430K sentence pairs(see Table 1 for the detailed statistics). We train

In all our experiments, we set bg = −1 to ensure thatgt is initially 0.26 on average.

[Gülçehre et al., 2015]

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Training data: monolingual

train NMT with monolingual data [Sennrich et al., 2016b]decoder is already a language model. Train encoder-decoder withadded monolingual datahow do we get approximation of context vector ci?

dummy source context (moderately effective)automatically back-translate monolingual data into source language→ synthetic training instances with approximate ci

EN→CS EN→DE EN→RO EN→RU CS→EN DE→EN RO→EN RU→EN

0

10

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30

40

20.9

26.823.9

20.3

25.328.5 29.2

22.523.7

31.628.1

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36.233.3

26.9

BLE

U

parallel +back-translations

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Page 32: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

Training data: monolingual

train NMT with monolingual data [Sennrich et al., 2016b]decoder is already a language model. Train encoder-decoder withadded monolingual datahow do we get approximation of context vector ci?

dummy source context (moderately effective)automatically back-translate monolingual data into source language→ synthetic training instances with approximate ci

EN→CS EN→DE EN→RO EN→RU CS→EN DE→EN RO→EN RU→EN

0

10

20

30

40

20.9

26.823.9

20.3

25.328.5 29.2

22.523.7

31.628.1

24.3

30.1

36.233.3

26.9

BLE

U

parallel +back-translations

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Other techniques @WMT16

ensembling of checkpoints

bidirectional decoding (R2L reranking)

CS→EN DE→EN RO→EN RU→EN

0.0

10.0

20.0

30.0

40.0

25.328.5 29.2

22.5

30.1

36.233.3

26.931.4

37.533.9

28.0

38.6

BLE

U

EN→CS EN→DE EN→RO EN→RU

0.0

10.0

20.0

30.0

40.0

20.9

26.823.9

20.323.7

31.628.1

24.324.8

33.128.2

26.025.8

34.2

BLE

U

parallel data +back-translations +ensemble +R2L reranking

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Phrase-based/neural MT hybridization

[Junczys-Dowmunt et al., 2016]use NMT as a feature function in phrase-based SMT→ approximations and batching for efficiency

effectiveness depends on quality of phrase-based and NMT system

English→Russian Russian→English

0.0

10.0

20.0

30.0

22.8

27.526.028.1

25.9

29.9

BLE

U

phrase-based SMT neural MT hybrid

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WMT16 results

system BLEU official rankuedin-nmt 34.2 1metamind 32.3 2uedin-syntax 30.6 3NYU-UMontreal 30.8 4online-B 29.4 5-10KIT/LIMSI 29.1 5-10cambridge 30.6 5-10online-A 29.9 5-10promt-rule 23.4 5-10KIT 29.0 6-10jhu-syntax 26.6 11-12jhu-pbmt 28.3 11-12uedin-pbmt 28.4 13-14online-F 19.3 13-15online-G 23.8 14-15

EN→DE

system BLEU official rankuedin-nmt 38.6 1online-B 35.0 2-5online-A 32.8 2-5uedin-syntax 34.4 2-5KIT 33.9 2-6uedin-pbmt 35.1 5-7jhu-pbmt 34.5 6-7online-G 30.1 8jhu-syntax 31.0 9online-F 20.2 10

DE→EN

pure NMT

NMT component

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Page 36: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

WMT16 results

system BLEU official rankuedin-nmt 34.2 1metamind 32.3 2uedin-syntax 30.6 3NYU-UMontreal 30.8 4online-B 29.4 5-10KIT/LIMSI 29.1 5-10cambridge 30.6 5-10online-A 29.9 5-10promt-rule 23.4 5-10KIT 29.0 6-10jhu-syntax 26.6 11-12jhu-pbmt 28.3 11-12uedin-pbmt 28.4 13-14online-F 19.3 13-15online-G 23.8 14-15

EN→DE

system BLEU official rankuedin-nmt 38.6 1online-B 35.0 2-5online-A 32.8 2-5uedin-syntax 34.4 2-5KIT 33.9 2-6uedin-pbmt 35.1 5-7jhu-pbmt 34.5 6-7online-G 30.1 8jhu-syntax 31.0 9online-F 20.2 10

DE→EN

pure NMT

NMT component

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Page 37: Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau · Neural Machine Translation: Breaking the Performance Plateau Rico Sennrich Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation

WMT16 results

system BLEU official rankuedin-nmt 34.2 1metamind 32.3 2uedin-syntax 30.6 3NYU-UMontreal 30.8 4online-B 29.4 5-10KIT/LIMSI 29.1 5-10cambridge 30.6 5-10online-A 29.9 5-10promt-rule 23.4 5-10KIT 29.0 6-10jhu-syntax 26.6 11-12jhu-pbmt 28.3 11-12uedin-pbmt 28.4 13-14online-F 19.3 13-15online-G 23.8 14-15

EN→DE

system BLEU official rankuedin-nmt 38.6 1online-B 35.0 2-5online-A 32.8 2-5uedin-syntax 34.4 2-5KIT 33.9 2-6uedin-pbmt 35.1 5-7jhu-pbmt 34.5 6-7online-G 30.1 8jhu-syntax 31.0 9online-F 20.2 10

DE→EN

pure NMT

NMT component

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WMT16 results

uedin-nmt 25.8 1NYU-UMontreal 23.6 2jhu-pbmt 23.6 3cu-chimera 21.0 4-5cu-tamchyna 20.8 4-5uedin-cu-syntax 20.9 6-7online-B 22.7 6-7online-A 19.5 15cu-TectoMT 14.7 16cu-mergedtrees 8.2 18

EN→CS

online-B 39.2 1-2uedin-nmt 33.9 1-2uedin-pbmt 35.2 3uedin-syntax 33.6 4-5online-A 30.8 4-6jhu-pbmt 32.2 5-7LIMSI 31.0 6-7

RO→EN

uedin-nmt 31.4 1jhu-pbmt 30.4 2online-B 28.6 3PJATK 28.3 8-10online-A 25.7 11cu-mergedtrees 13.3 12

CS→EN

uedin-nmt 28.1 1-2QT21-HimL-SysComb 28.9 1-2KIT 25.8 3-7uedin-pbmt 26.8 3-7online-B 25.4 3-7uedin-lmu-hiero 25.9 3-7RWTH-SYSCOMB 27.1 3-7LIMSI 23.9 8-10lmu-cuni 24.3 8-10jhu-pbmt 23.5 8-11usfd-rescoring 23.1 10-12online-A 19.2 11-12

EN→RO

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WMT16 resultsPROMT-rule 22.3 1amu-uedin 25.3 2-4online-B 23.8 2-5uedin-nmt 26.0 2-5online-G 26.2 3-5NYU-UMontreal 23.1 6jhu-pbmt 24.0 7-8LIMSI 23.6 7-10online-A 20.2 8-10AFRL-MITLL-phr 23.5 9-10AFRL-MITLL-verb 20.9 11online-F 8.6 12

EN→RU

amu-uedin 29.1 1-2online-G 28.7 1-3NRC 29.1 2-4online-B 28.1 3-5uedin-nmt 28.0 4-5online-A 25.7 6-7AFRL-MITLL-phr 27.6 6-7AFRL-MITLL-contrast 27.0 8-9PROMT-rule 20.4 8-9online-F 13.5 10

RU→EN

uedin-pbmt 23.4 1-4online-G 20.6 1-4online-B 23.6 1-4UH-opus 23.1 1-4PROMT-SMT 20.3 5UH-factored 19.3 6-7uedin-syntax 20.4 6-7online-A 19.0 8jhu-pbmt 19.1 9

FI→EN

online-G 15.4 1-3abumatra-nmt 17.2 1-4

online-B 14.4 1-4abumatran-combo 17.4 3-5

UH-opus 16.3 4-5NYU-UMontreal 15.1 6-8

abumatran-pbsmt 14.6 6-8online-A 13.0 6-8jhu-pbmt 13.8 9-10

UH-factored 12.8 9-12aalto 11.6 10-13

jhu-hltcoe 11.9 10-13UUT 11.6 11-13

EN→FI

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 17 / 38

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Neural Machine Translation

1 Recent advances in neural MT

2 Towards using neural MT in productionthings that are suddenly easy(er)things that are suddenly hard(er)things that are still hard

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 18 / 38

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Production use of neural MT

use of neural MT in production is only a matter of time

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 19 / 38

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Production use of neural MT

use of neural MT in production is only a matter of time has begun

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 19 / 38

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Production use of neural MT

use of neural MT in production is only a matter of time has begun

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 19 / 38

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Production use of neural MT

use of neural MT in production is only a matter of time has begun

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 19 / 38

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Production use of neural MT

use of neural MT in production is only a matter of time has begun

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 19 / 38

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Production use of neural MT

use of neural MT in production is only a matter of time has begun

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 19 / 38

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Production use of neural MT

use of neural MT in production is only a matter of time has begun

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 19 / 38

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Production use of neural MT

use of neural MT in production is only a matter of time has begun

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 19 / 38

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Neural Machine Translation

1 Recent advances in neural MT

2 Towards using neural MT in productionthings that are suddenly easy(er)things that are suddenly hard(er)things that are still hard

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 20 / 38

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Fluency

main strength of neural MT [Neubig et al., 2015, Bojar et al., 2016, Bentivogli et al., 2016]

+1% +13%

CS→EN DE→EN RO→EN RU→EN

60

80

100

70.8 72.2 73.9 72.875.4 75.8

71.2 71.1

Ade

quac

y

ONLINE-B UEDIN-NMT

CS→EN DE→EN RO→EN RU→EN

60

80

100

64.668.4 66.7 67.8

78.7 77.571.9 74.3

Flue

ncy

ONLINE-B UEDIN-NMT

WMT16 direct assessment results

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Fluency

main strength of neural MT [Neubig et al., 2015, Bojar et al., 2016, Bentivogli et al., 2016]

+1%

+13%

CS→EN DE→EN RO→EN RU→EN

60

80

100

70.8 72.2 73.9 72.875.4 75.8

71.2 71.1

Ade

quac

y

ONLINE-B UEDIN-NMT

CS→EN DE→EN RO→EN RU→EN

60

80

100

64.668.4 66.7 67.8

78.7 77.571.9 74.3

Flue

ncy

ONLINE-B UEDIN-NMT

WMT16 direct assessment results

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Fluency

main strength of neural MT [Neubig et al., 2015, Bojar et al., 2016, Bentivogli et al., 2016]

+1%

+13%

CS→EN DE→EN RO→EN RU→EN

60

80

100

70.8 72.2 73.9 72.875.4 75.8

71.2 71.1

Ade

quac

y

ONLINE-B UEDIN-NMT

CS→EN DE→EN RO→EN RU→EN

60

80

100

64.668.4 66.7 67.8

78.7 77.571.9 74.3

Flue

ncy

ONLINE-B UEDIN-NMT

WMT16 direct assessment results

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 21 / 38

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Fluency

main strength of neural MT [Neubig et al., 2015, Bojar et al., 2016, Bentivogli et al., 2016]

+1% +13%

CS→EN DE→EN RO→EN RU→EN

60

80

100

70.8 72.2 73.9 72.875.4 75.8

71.2 71.1

Ade

quac

y

ONLINE-B UEDIN-NMT

CS→EN DE→EN RO→EN RU→EN

60

80

100

64.668.4 66.7 67.8

78.7 77.571.9 74.3

Flue

ncy

ONLINE-B UEDIN-NMT

WMT16 direct assessment results

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 21 / 38

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Why is neural MT so much more fluent?

phrase-based SMTstrong independenceassumptions

log-linear combination ofmany “weak” features

neural MToutput conditioned on fullsource text and targethistory

end-to-end trained model

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Fluency: example (WMT16; UEDIN submissions)

system sentenceSRC Unsere digitalen Leben haben die Notwendigkeit, stark, lebenslustig

und erfolgreich zu erscheinen, verdoppelt [...]REF Our digital lives have doubled the need to appear strong, fun-loving and successful [...]PBSMT Our digital lives are lively, strong, and to be successful, doubled [...]NMT Our digital lives have doubled the need to appear strong, lifelike and successful [...]

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Controlling neural MT

T-V distinctionlanguage informal (T) formal (V)Latin tu vosChinese 你(nı) 您 (nín)French tu vousGerman du SieItalian tu LeiPolish ty panSpanish tú usted

Early Modern English thou yeModern English you

What users want

inconsistency in T-V choice is a “limitation of MT technology” that is“often frustrat[ing]” to post-editors [Etchegoyhen et al., 2014]

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Controlling neural MT

T-V distinctionlanguage informal (T) formal (V)Latin tu vosChinese 你(nı) 您 (nín)French tu vousGerman du SieItalian tu LeiPolish ty panSpanish tú usted

Early Modern English thou yeModern English you

What users want

inconsistency in T-V choice is a “limitation of MT technology” that is“often frustrat[ing]” to post-editors [Etchegoyhen et al., 2014]

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 24 / 38

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Controlling neural MT

T-V distinctionlanguage informal (T) formal (V)Latin tu vosChinese 你(nı) 您 (nín)French tu vousGerman du SieItalian tu LeiPolish ty panSpanish tú usted

Early Modern English thou yeModern English you

What users want

inconsistency in T-V choice is a “limitation of MT technology” that is“often frustrat[ing]” to post-editors [Etchegoyhen et al., 2014]

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Side constraints [Sennrich et al., 2016a]

Core ideaadditional input feature that is based on target-side information→ extra word at end of source sentence

mark in English text if German translation is polite or not (+noise)

Are you ok?

<polite>

Sind Sie in Ordnung?

are you ok?

<informal>

Bist du in Ordnung?

At test timewe can control level of politeness by adding side constraints to input

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Side constraints [Sennrich et al., 2016a]

Core ideaadditional input feature that is based on target-side information→ extra word at end of source sentence

mark in English text if German translation is polite or not (+noise)

Are you ok?

<polite>

Sind Sie in Ordnung?

are you ok?

<informal>

Bist du in Ordnung?

At test timewe can control level of politeness by adding side constraints to input

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Side constraints [Sennrich et al., 2016a]

Core ideaadditional input feature that is based on target-side information→ extra word at end of source sentence

mark in English text if German translation is polite or not (+noise)

Are you ok? <polite>

Sind Sie in Ordnung?

are you ok? <informal>

Bist du in Ordnung?

At test timewe can control level of politeness by adding side constraints to input

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Results: politeness as a function of side constraint

(reference) none polite informal0

500

1,000

1,500

2,000

side constraint

form

ality

oftra

nsla

tion

neutral polite informal

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 26 / 38

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Interactive MT: constrained decoding

[Wuebker et al., 2016]prefix-constrained decoding of highinterest for interactive MT

phrase-based MT has problems withreachability; requires new algorithms

prefix-constrained decoding with neuralMT is very natural

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 27 / 38

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Incremental/online training

Neural MT uses iterative training (SGD or Reinforcement Learning)→ stopping/continuing training trivial

problematic: expanding vocabulary→ unnecessary with subword modelsmulti-BLEU improvements reported with minutes of training time[Sennrich et al., 2016b, Luong and Manning, 2015, Crego et al., 2016]

in-domain engines, automatically post-editingan existing translation model using transla-tion memories, extracting and re-using termi-nology. With Neural Machine Translation, anew notion of “specialization” comes close tothe concept of incremental translation as de-veloped for statistical machine translation like(Ortiz-Martınez et al., 2010).

4.6.1 Generic Specialization

Domain adaptation techniques have successfullybeen used in Statistical Machine Translation. It iswell known that a system optimized on a specifictext genre obtains higher accuracy results than a“generic” system. The adaptation process can bedone before, during or after the training process.Our preliminary experiments follow the latter ap-proach. We incrementally adapt a Neural MT“generic” system to a specific domain by runningadditional training epochs over newly available in-domain data.

Adaptation proceeds incrementally when newin-domain data becomes available, generated byhuman translators while post-editing, which issimilar to the Computer Aided Translation frame-work described in (Cettolo et al., 2014).

We experiment on an English-to-French trans-lation task. The generic model is a subsample ofthe corpora made available for the WMT15 trans-lation task (Bojar et al., 2015). Source and tar-get NMT vocabularies are the 60k most frequentwords of source and target training datasets. Thein-domain data is extracted from the EuropeanMedical Agency (EMEA) corpus. Table 7 showssome statistics of the corpora used in this experi-ment.

Type Corpus # lines # src tok (EN) # tgt tok (FR)Train Generic 1M 24M 26M

EMEA 4,393 48k 56kTest EMEA 2,787 23k 27k

Table 7: Data used to train and adapt the genericmodel to a specific domain. The test corpus alsobelongs to the specific domain.

Our preliminary results show that incrementaladaptation is effective for even limited amountsof in-domain data (nearly 50k additional words).Constrained to use the original “generic” vocabu-lary, adaptation of the models can be run in a fewseconds, showing clear quality improvements onin-domain test sets.

Figure 3 compares the accuracy (BLEU) of

0 1 2 3 4 5

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

Additional epochs

BL

EU

adaptfull

Figure 3: Adaptation with In-Domain data.

two systems: full is trained after concatenationof generic and in-domain data; adapt is initiallytrained over generic data (showing a BLEU scoreof 29.01 at epoch0) and adapted after running sev-eral training epochs overonly the in-domain train-ing data. Both systems share the same ”generic”NMT vocabularies. As it can be seen the adaptsystem improves drastically its accuracy after asingle additional training epoch, obtaining a simi-lar BLEU score than the full system (separated by.91 BLEU). Note also that each additional epochusing the in-domain training data takes less than50 seconds to be processed, while training the fullsystem needs more than17 hours.

Results validate the utility of the adaptation ap-proach. A human post-editor would take advan-tage of using new training data as soon as it be-comes available, without needing to wait for a longfull training process. However, the comparison isnot entirely fair since full training would allow toinclude the in-domain vocabulary in the new fullmodel, what surely would result in an additionalaccuracy improvement.

4.6.2 Post-editing Engine

Recent success of Pure Neural Machine Transla-tion has led to the application of this technologyto various related tasks and in particular to the Au-tomatic Post-Editing (APE). The goal of this taskis to simulate the behavior of a human post-editor,correcting translation errors made by a MT sys-tem.

Until recently, most of the APE approacheshave been based on phrase-based SMT sys-tems, either monolingual (MT target to hu-man post-edition) (Simard et al., 2007) or source-

[Crego et al., 2016]

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 28 / 38

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Neural Machine Translation

1 Recent advances in neural MT

2 Towards using neural MT in productionthings that are suddenly easy(er)things that are suddenly hard(er)things that are still hard

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 29 / 38

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Model interpretation/manipulation

limited interpretability of neural network

limited ability to manipulate neural network

more research on terminology integration needed

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Model interpretation/manipulation

limited interpretability of neural network

limited ability to manipulate neural network

more research on terminology integration needed

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Alignment

attention model

attends to states that are relevant for next translation decision

...bearing in mind that information can travel along RNN

→ no ’traditional’ word alignment

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Neural Machine Translation

1 Recent advances in neural MT

2 Towards using neural MT in productionthings that are suddenly easy(er)things that are suddenly hard(er)things that are still hard

Rico Sennrich Neural Machine Translation 32 / 38

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Ambiguitysystem sentenceSRC Dort wurde er von dem Schläger und einer weiteren männl. Person erneut angegriffen.REF There he was attacked again by his original attacker and another male.PBSMT There, he was at the club and another male person attacked again.NMT There he was attacked again by the racket and another male person.

Schläger

attackerracket club

racket https://www.flickr.com/photos/128067141@N07/15157111178 / CC BY 2.0attacker https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikibully.jpg

golf club https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golf_club,_Callawax_X-20_8_iron_-_III.jpg / CC-BY-SA-3.0

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Ambiguitysystem sentenceSRC Dort wurde er von dem Schläger und einer weiteren männl. Person erneut angegriffen.REF There he was attacked again by his original attacker and another male.PBSMT There, he was at the club and another male person attacked again.NMT There he was attacked again by the racket and another male person.

Schläger

attacker

racket

club

racket https://www.flickr.com/photos/128067141@N07/15157111178 / CC BY 2.0attacker https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikibully.jpg

golf club https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golf_club,_Callawax_X-20_8_iron_-_III.jpg / CC-BY-SA-3.0

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Ambiguitysystem sentenceSRC Dort wurde er von dem Schläger und einer weiteren männl. Person erneut angegriffen.REF There he was attacked again by his original attacker and another male.PBSMT There, he was at the club and another male person attacked again.NMT There he was attacked again by the racket and another male person.

Schläger

attackerracket

club

racket https://www.flickr.com/photos/128067141@N07/15157111178 / CC BY 2.0attacker https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikibully.jpg

golf club https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golf_club,_Callawax_X-20_8_iron_-_III.jpg / CC-BY-SA-3.0

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Ambiguitysystem sentenceSRC Dort wurde er von dem Schläger und einer weiteren männl. Person erneut angegriffen.REF There he was attacked again by his original attacker and another male.PBSMT There, he was at the club and another male person attacked again.NMT There he was attacked again by the racket and another male person.

Schläger

attackerracket club

racket https://www.flickr.com/photos/128067141@N07/15157111178 / CC BY 2.0attacker https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikibully.jpg

golf club https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golf_club,_Callawax_X-20_8_iron_-_III.jpg / CC-BY-SA-3.0

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Rare wordssystem sentenceSRC Titelverteidiger ist Drittligaabsteiger SpVgg Unterhaching.REF The defending champions are SpVgg Unterhaching,

who have been relegated to the third league.PBSMT Title defender Drittligaabsteiger Week 2.NMT Defending champion is third-round pick SpVgg Underhaching.

fully character-level models [Lee et al., 2016]

(a) Spelling mistakesDE ori Warum sollten wir nicht Freunde sei ?DE src Warum solltne wir nich Freunde sei ?EN ref Why should not we be friends ?bpe2char Why are we to be friends ?char2char Why should we not be friends ?

(b) Rare wordsDE src Siebentausendzweihundertvierundfunfzig .EN ref Seven thousand two hundred fifty four .bpe2char Fifty-five Decline of the Seventy .char2char Seven thousand hundred thousand fifties .

(c) MorphologyDE src Die Zufahrtsstraßen wurden gesperrt , wodurch sich laut CNN lange Ruckstaus bildeten .EN ref The access roads were blocked off , which , according to CNN , caused long tailbacks .bpe2char The access roads were locked , which , according to CNN , was long back .char2char The access roads were blocked , which looked long backwards , according to CNN .

(d) Nonce wordsDE src Der Test ist nun uber , aber ich habe keine gute Note . Es ist wie eine Verschlimmbesserung .EN ref The test is now over , but i don’t have any good grade . it is like a worsened improvement .bpe2char The test is now over , but i do not have a good note .char2char The test is now , but i have no good note , it is like a worsening improvement .

(e) MultilingualMulti src Die Bewegung wird auch von dva byvalı amerikanischen ministri dopravy unterstutzt , которые в

2011 году призвали конгресс двигаться в направлении meilenbasierter Abrechnung .EN ref The movement is also bolstered by two former U.S. Transportation secretaries , who in a 2011 report

urged Congress to move in the pay-per-mile direction .bpe2char The movement is also supported by two former American ministers of transport , which in 2011 called

for Congress to move in the direction of meeinbased reckoning .char2char The movement is also supported by two former American ministers of transport , which in 2011 called

for Congress to move towards miles-based accounting .

Table 6: Sample translations. For each example, we show the source sentence as src, the human translation as ref,and the translations from the subword-level baseline and our character-level model as bpe2char and char2char, re-spectively. For (a), the original, uncorrupted source sentence is also shown (ori). The source sentence in (e) containswords in German (in green), Czech (in yellow) and Russian (in blue). The translations in (a-d) are from the bilingualmodels, whereas those in (e) are from the multilingual models.

Handling morphological inflections should alsobe relatively easy for a character-level model. Weobserve that this is indeed the case, as our char2charmodel correctly understands “gesperrt”, a past par-ticiple form of “sperren” (to block) (Table 6 (c)).

Nonce words are terms coined for a single use.They are not actual words but are constructed ina way that humans can intuitively guess what theymean, such as workoliday and friyay. We constructa few DE-EN sentence pairs that contain German

nonce words (one example shown in Table 6 (d)),and observe that the character-level model can in-deed detect salient character patterns and arrive at acorrect translation.

Finally, we evaluate our multilingual models’ ca-pacity to perform intra-sentence code-switching, bygiving them as input mixed sentences from multi-ple languages. We discover that when given sen-tences with high degree of language intermixing,as in Table 6 (e) or Table 12 (k) in the Appendix,

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Discourse

English I made a decision. Please respect it.French J’ai pris une décision. Respectez-la s’il vous plaît.French J’ai fait un choix. Respectez-le s’il vous plaît.

most MT systems do not take discourse context into account...

... but neural MT is a promising architecture to solve this problem

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Low-resourced language pairs

most language pairs have few parallel resources

is NMT more data efficient than phrase-based SMT?

new potential: sharing of model parameters between language pairs[Zoph et al., 2016, Dong et al., 2015, Firat et al., 2016, Lee et al., 2016]Figure 2: Multi-task learning framework for multiple-target language translation

Figure 3: Optimization for end to multi-end model

3.4 Translation with Beam SearchAlthough parallel corpora are available for theencoder and the decoder modeling in the trainingphrase, the ground truth is not available during testtime. During test time, translation is produced byfinding the most likely sequence via beam search.

Y = argmaxY

p(YTp |STp) (15)

Given the target direction we want to translate to,beam search is performed with the shared encoderand a specific target decoder where search spacebelongs to the decoder Tp. We adopt beam searchalgorithm similar as it is used in SMT system(Koehn, 2004) except that we only utilize scoresproduced by each decoder as features. The sizeof beam is 10 in our experiments for speedupconsideration. Beam search is ended until the end-of-sentence eos symbol is generated.

4 Experiments

We conducted two groups of experiments toshow the effectiveness of our framework. Thegoal of the first experiment is to show thatmulti-task learning helps to improve translationperformance given enough training corpora for alllanguage pairs. In the second experiment, weshow that for some resource-poor language pairswith a few parallel training data, their translationperformance could be improved as well.

4.1 DatasetThe Europarl corpus is a multi-lingual corpusincluding 21 European languages. Here we onlychoose four language pairs for our experiments.The source language is English for all languagepairs. And the target languages are Spanish(Es), French (Fr), Portuguese (Pt) and Dutch(Nl). To demonstrate the validity of ourlearning framework, we do some preprocessingon the training set. For the source language,we use 30k of the most frequent words forsource language vocabulary which is sharedacross different language pairs and 30k mostfrequent words for each target language. Out-of-vocabulary words are denoted as unknownwords, and we maintain different unknown wordlabels for different languages. For test sets,we also restrict all words in the test set tobe from our training vocabulary and mark theOOV words as the corresponding labels as inthe training data. The size of training corpus inexperiment 1 and 2 is listed in Table 1 where

1727

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Conclusions

neural MT has achieved state of the art on many tasks...... and is still improving quicklyindustry adoption is happening, but beware:

some things are suddenly easy(er)some things are suddenly hard(er)

machine translation still has hard problems to tackle...

...and neural MT offers exciting new ways to address them

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Thanks

Collaborators

Alexandra Birch Barry Haddow Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt

Kenneth Heafield Antonio Valerio Tomasz DwojakMiceli Barone

AcknowledgmentsSome of the research presented was conducted in cooperation with Samsung Electronics Polska.

This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 researchand innovation programme under grant agreements 645452 (QT21), TraMOOC(644333), HimL (644402), and SUMMA (688139).

Thank you for your attention

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Thanks

Collaborators

Alexandra Birch Barry Haddow Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt

Kenneth Heafield Antonio Valerio Tomasz DwojakMiceli Barone

AcknowledgmentsSome of the research presented was conducted in cooperation with Samsung Electronics Polska.

This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 researchand innovation programme under grant agreements 645452 (QT21), TraMOOC(644333), HimL (644402), and SUMMA (688139).

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