Towards Bidirectional Hierarchical Representations for Attention-based Neural Machine Translation

Baosong Yang, Derek F. Wong, Tong Xiao, Lidia S. Chao, Jingbo Zhu


Abstract
This paper proposes a hierarchical attentional neural translation model which focuses on enhancing source-side hierarchical representations by covering both local and global semantic information using a bidirectional tree-based encoder. To maximize the predictive likelihood of target words, a weighted variant of an attention mechanism is used to balance the attentive information between lexical and phrase vectors. Using a tree-based rare word encoding, the proposed model is extended to sub-word level to alleviate the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem. Empirical results reveal that the proposed model significantly outperforms sequence-to-sequence attention-based and tree-based neural translation models in English-Chinese translation tasks.
Anthology ID:
D17-1150
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1432–1441
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1150
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1150
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Baosong Yang, Derek F. Wong, Tong Xiao, Lidia S. Chao, and Jingbo Zhu. 2017. Towards Bidirectional Hierarchical Representations for Attention-based Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1432–1441, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Bidirectional Hierarchical Representations for Attention-based Neural Machine Translation (Yang et al., EMNLP 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/D17-1150.pdf