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Simple and Effective Noisy Channel Modeling for Neural Machine Translation (arxiv.org)
2 points by sel1 on Aug 20, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A translation system scores options by combining how well each matches the original sentence with how natural it sounds in the target language, using ordinary models that see the whole sentence. It beat the direct model by up to 3.2 points on a standard score.

Abstract

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 WMT'17 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.

Kyra Yee, Nathan Ng, Yann N. Dauphin, Michael Auli
arXiv:1908.05731 · cs.CL · submitted Aug 15, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · EMNLP 2019

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