Integrating Weakly Supervised Word Sense Disambiguation into Neural Machine Translation
Xiao Pu, Nikolaos Pappas, James Henderson, Andrei Popescu-Belis
Abstract
This paper demonstrates that word sense disambiguation (WSD) can improve neural machine translation (NMT) by widening the source context considered when modeling the senses of potentially ambiguous words. We first introduce three adaptive clustering algorithms for WSD, based on k-means, Chinese restaurant processes, and random walks, which are then applied to large word contexts represented in a low-rank space and evaluated on SemEval shared-task data. We then learn word vectors jointly with sense vectors defined by our best WSD method, within a state-of-the-art NMT system. We show that the concatenation of these vectors, and the use of a sense selection mechanism based on the weighted average of sense vectors, outperforms several baselines including sense-aware ones. This is demonstrated by translation on five language pairs. The improvements are more than 1 BLEU point over strong NMT baselines, +4% accuracy over all ambiguous nouns and verbs, or +20% when scored manually over several challenging words.- Anthology ID:
- Q18-1044
- Volume:
- Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 6
- Month:
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- Cambridge, MA
- Editors:
- Lillian Lee, Mark Johnson, Kristina Toutanova, Brian Roark
- Venue:
- TACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- MIT Press
- Note:
- Pages:
- 635–649
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_missing_videos/Q18-1044/
- DOI:
- 10.1162/tacl_a_00242
- Cite (ACL):
- Xiao Pu, Nikolaos Pappas, James Henderson, and Andrei Popescu-Belis. 2018. Integrating Weakly Supervised Word Sense Disambiguation into Neural Machine Translation. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 6:635–649.
- Cite (Informal):
- Integrating Weakly Supervised Word Sense Disambiguation into Neural Machine Translation (Pu et al., TACL 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_missing_videos/Q18-1044.pdf
- Code
- idiap/sense_aware_NMT
- Data
- WMT 2014