about
Improving Neural Machine Translation with Pre-Trained Representation (arxiv.org)
1 point by sel1 on Aug 23, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It learns whole-sentence meaning from plain single-language text and feeds it into the translator, where today's tricks borrow only word-level knowledge like synthetic sentence pairs. It beat a strong standard translation system on Chinese-English and German-English, and helped most when training data was scarce.

Abstract · Improving Neural Machine Translation with Pre-trained Representation

Monolingual data has been demonstrated to be helpful in improving the translation quality of neural machine translation (NMT). The current methods stay at the usage of word-level knowledge, such as generating synthetic parallel data or extracting information from word embedding. In contrast, the power of sentence-level contextual knowledge which is more complex and diverse, playing an important role in natural language generation, has not been fully exploited. In this paper, we propose a novel structure which could leverage monolingual data to acquire sentence-level contextual representations. Then, we design a framework for integrating both source and target sentence-level representations into NMT model to improve the translation quality. Experimental results on Chinese-English, German-English machine translation tasks show that our proposed model achieves improvement over strong Transformer baselines, while experiments on English-Turkish further demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in the low-resource scenario.

Rongxiang Weng, Heng Yu, Shujian Huang, Weihua Luo, Jiajun Chen
arXiv:1908.07688 · cs.CL · submitted Aug 21, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · In Progress

add comment on HN