The RWTH Aachen University Supervised Machine Translation Systems for WMT 2018

Julian Schamper, Jan Rosendahl, Parnia Bahar, Yunsu Kim, Arne Nix, Hermann Ney


Abstract
This paper describes the statistical machine translation systems developed at RWTH Aachen University for the German→English, English→Turkish and Chinese→English translation tasks of the EMNLP 2018 Third Conference on Machine Translation (WMT 2018). We use ensembles of neural machine translation systems based on the Transformer architecture. Our main focus is on the German→English task where we to all automatic scored first with respect metrics provided by the organizers. We identify data selection, fine-tuning, batch size and model dimension as important hyperparameters. In total we improve by 6.8% BLEU over our last year’s submission and by 4.8% BLEU over the winning system of the 2017 German→English task. In English→Turkish task, we show 3.6% BLEU improvement over the last year’s winning system. We further report results on the Chinese→English task where we improve 2.2% BLEU on average over our baseline systems but stay behind the 2018 winning systems.
Anthology ID:
W18-6426
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Belgium, Brussels
Editors:
Ondřej Bojar, Rajen Chatterjee, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Yvette Graham, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz, Matteo Negri, Aurélie Névéol, Mariana Neves, Matt Post, Lucia Specia, Marco Turchi, Karin Verspoor
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
496–503
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6426
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-6426
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Julian Schamper, Jan Rosendahl, Parnia Bahar, Yunsu Kim, Arne Nix, and Hermann Ney. 2018. The RWTH Aachen University Supervised Machine Translation Systems for WMT 2018. In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers, pages 496–503, Belgium, Brussels. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The RWTH Aachen University Supervised Machine Translation Systems for WMT 2018 (Schamper et al., WMT 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/W18-6426.pdf
Code
 awslabs/sockeye