Laohu Wang


2021

This paper describes NiuTrans neural machine translation systems of the WMT 2021 news translation tasks. We made submissions to 9 language directions, including English2Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Icelandic and English2Hausa tasks. Our primary systems are built on several effective variants of Transformer, e.g., Transformer-DLCL, ODE-Transformer. We also utilize back-translation, knowledge distillation, post-ensemble, and iterative fine-tuning techniques to enhance the model performance further.

2020

This paper describes NiuTrans neural machine translation systems of the WMT20 news translation tasks. We participated in Japanese<->English, English->Chinese, Inuktitut->English and Tamil->English total five tasks and rank first in Japanese<->English both sides. We mainly utilized iterative back-translation, different depth and widen model architectures, iterative knowledge distillation and iterative fine-tuning. And we find that adequately widened and deepened the model simultaneously, the performance will significantly improve. Also, iterative fine-tuning strategy we implemented is effective during adapting domain. For Inuktitut->English and Tamil->English tasks, we built multilingual models separately and employed pretraining word embedding to obtain better performance.