Zhuohan Li


2019

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Hint-Based Training for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation
Zhuohan Li | Zi Lin | Di He | Fei Tian | Tao Qin | Liwei Wang | Tie-Yan Liu
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Due to the unparallelizable nature of the autoregressive factorization, AutoRegressive Translation (ART) models have to generate tokens sequentially during decoding and thus suffer from high inference latency. Non-AutoRegressive Translation (NART) models were proposed to reduce the inference time, but could only achieve inferior translation accuracy. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to leveraging the hints from hidden states and word alignments to help the training of NART models. The results achieve significant improvement over previous NART models for the WMT14 En-De and De-En datasets and are even comparable to a strong LSTM-based ART baseline but one order of magnitude faster in inference.