Structural Biases for Improving Transformers on Translation into Morphologically Rich Languages

Paul Soulos, Sudha Rao, Caitlin Smith, Eric Rosen, Asli Celikyilmaz, R. Thomas McCoy, Yichen Jiang, Coleman Haley, Roland Fernandez, Hamid Palangi, Jianfeng Gao, Paul Smolensky


Abstract
Machine translation has seen rapid progress with the advent of Transformer-based models. These models have no explicit linguistic structure built into them, yet they may still implicitly learn structured relationships by attending to relevant tokens. We hypothesize that this structural learning could be made more robust by explicitly endowing Transformers with a structural bias, and we investigate two methods for building in such a bias. One method, the TP-Transformer, augments the traditional Transformer architecture to include an additional component to represent structure. The second method imbues structure at the data level by segmenting the data with morphological tokenization. We test these methods on translating from English into morphologically rich languages, Turkish and Inuktitut, and consider both automatic metrics and human evaluations. We find that each of these two approaches allows the network to achieve better performance, but this improvement is dependent on the size of the dataset. In sum, structural encoding methods make Transformers more sample-efficient, enabling them to perform better from smaller amounts of data.
Anthology ID:
2021.mtsummit-loresmt.6
Original:
2021.mtsummit-loresmt.6v1
Version 2:
2021.mtsummit-loresmt.6v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Virtual
Venue:
LoResMT
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Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
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Pages:
52–67
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.mtsummit-loresmt.6
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paul Soulos, Sudha Rao, Caitlin Smith, Eric Rosen, Asli Celikyilmaz, R. Thomas McCoy, Yichen Jiang, Coleman Haley, Roland Fernandez, Hamid Palangi, Jianfeng Gao, and Paul Smolensky. 2021. Structural Biases for Improving Transformers on Translation into Morphologically Rich Languages. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT2021), pages 52–67, Virtual. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
Structural Biases for Improving Transformers on Translation into Morphologically Rich Languages (Soulos et al., LoResMT 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.mtsummit-loresmt.6.pdf
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