It has been widely recognized that syntax information can help end-to-end neural machine translation (NMT) systems to achieve better translation. In order to integrate dependency information into Transformer based NMT, existing approaches either exploit words’ local head-dependent relations, ignoring their non-local neighbors carrying important context; or approximate two words’ syntactic relation by their relative distance on the dependency tree, sacrificing exactness. To address these issues, we propose global positional encoding for dependency tree, a new scheme that facilitates syntactic relation modeling between any two words with keeping exactness and without immediate neighbor constraint. Experiment results on NC11 German→English, English→German and WMT English→German datasets show that our approach is more effective than the above two strategies. In addition, our experiments quantitatively show that compared with higher layers, lower layers of the model are more proper places to incorporate syntax information in terms of each layer’s preference to the syntactic pattern and the final performance.

Automated essay scoring (AES) is the task of automatically assigning scores to essays as an alternative to grading by human raters. Conventional AES typically relies on handcrafted features, whereas recent studies have proposed AES models based on deep neural networks (DNNs) to obviate the need for feature engineering. Furthermore, hybrid methods that integrate handcrafted features in a DNN-AES model have been recently developed and have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy. One of the most popular hybrid methods is formulated as a DNN-AES model with an additional recurrent neural network (RNN) that processes a sequence of handcrafted sentence-level features. However, this method has the following problems: 1) It cannot incorporate effective essay-level features developed in previous AES research. 2) It greatly increases the numbers of model parameters and tuning parameters, increasing the difficulty of model training. 3) It has an additional RNN to process sentence-level features, enabling extension to various DNN-AES models complex. To resolve these problems, we propose a new hybrid method that integrates handcrafted essay-level features into a DNN-AES model. Specifically, our method concatenates handcrafted essay-level features to a distributed essay representation vector, which is obtained from an intermediate layer of a DNN-AES model. Our method is a simple DNN-AES extension, but significantly improves scoring accuracy.