Improving Neural Machine Translation with Neural Syntactic Distance

Chunpeng Ma, Akihiro Tamura, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita, Tiejun Zhao

Abstract
The explicit use of syntactic information has been proved useful for neural machine translation (NMT). However, previous methods resort to either tree-structured neural networks or long linearized sequences, both of which are inefficient. Neural syntactic distance (NSD) enables us to represent a constituent tree using a sequence whose length is identical to the number of words in the sentence. NSD has been used for constituent parsing, but not in machine translation. We propose five strategies to improve NMT with NSD. Experiments show that it is not trivial to improve NMT with NSD; however, the proposed strategies are shown to improve translation performance of the baseline model (+2.1 (En–Ja), +1.3 (Ja–En), +1.2 (En–Ch), and +1.0 (Ch–En) BLEU).
Anthology ID:
N19-1205
Original:
N19-1205v1
Version 2:
N19-1205v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2032–2037
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1205
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1205
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chunpeng Ma, Akihiro Tamura, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita, and Tiejun Zhao. 2019. Improving Neural Machine Translation with Neural Syntactic Distance. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 2032–2037, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Neural Machine Translation with Neural Syntactic Distance (Ma et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/N19-1205.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/355792799
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