Neural Machine Translation Incorporating Named Entity

Arata Ugawa, Akihiro Tamura, Takashi Ninomiya, Hiroya Takamura, Manabu Okumura

Abstract
This study proposes a new neural machine translation (NMT) model based on the encoder-decoder model that incorporates named entity (NE) tags of source-language sentences. Conventional NMT models have two problems enumerated as follows: (i) they tend to have difficulty in translating words with multiple meanings because of the high ambiguity, and (ii) these models’abilitytotranslatecompoundwordsseemschallengingbecausetheencoderreceivesaword, a part of the compound word, at each time step. To alleviate these problems, the encoder of the proposed model encodes the input word on the basis of its NE tag at each time step, which could reduce the ambiguity of the input word. Furthermore,the encoder introduces a chunk-level LSTM layer over a word-level LSTM layer and hierarchically encodes a source-language sentence to capture a compound NE as a chunk on the basis of the NE tags. We evaluate the proposed model on an English-to-Japanese translation task with the ASPEC, and English-to-Bulgarian and English-to-Romanian translation tasks with the Europarl corpus. The evaluation results show that the proposed model achieves up to 3.11 point improvement in BLEU.
Anthology ID:
C18-1274
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3240–3250
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1274
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arata Ugawa, Akihiro Tamura, Takashi Ninomiya, Hiroya Takamura, and Manabu Okumura. 2018. Neural Machine Translation Incorporating Named Entity. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3240–3250, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Neural Machine Translation Incorporating Named Entity (Ugawa et al., COLING 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/C18-1274.pdf
Data
ASPEC
PDF Search