Natural language sentences, being hierarchical, can be represented at different levels of granularity, like words, subwords, or characters. But most neural machine translation systems require the sentence to be represented as a sequence at a single level of granularity. It can be difficult to determine which granularity is better for a particular translation task. In this paper, we improve the model by incorporating multiple levels of granularity. Specifically, we propose (1) an encoder with character attention which augments the (sub)word-level representation with character-level information; (2) a decoder with multiple attentions that enable the representations from different levels of granularity to control the translation cooperatively. Experiments on three translation tasks demonstrate that our proposed models outperform the standard word-based model, the subword-based model, and a strong character-based model.

Most neural machine translation (NMT) models are based on the sequential encoder-decoder framework, which makes no use of syntactic information. In this paper, we improve this model by explicitly incorporating source-side syntactic trees. More specifically, we propose (1) a bidirectional tree encoder which learns both sequential and tree structured representations; (2) a tree-coverage model that lets the attention depend on the source-side syntax. Experiments on Chinese-English translation demonstrate that our proposed models outperform the sequential attentional model as well as a stronger baseline with a bottom-up tree encoder and word coverage.

Pairwise ranking methods are the most widely used discriminative training approaches for structure prediction problems in natural language processing (NLP). Decomposing the problem of ranking hypotheses into pairwise comparisons enables simple and efficient solutions. However, neglecting the global ordering of the hypothesis list may hinder learning. We propose a listwise learning framework for structure prediction problems such as machine translation. Our framework directly models the entire translation list’s ordering to learn parameters which may better fit the given listwise samples. Furthermore, we propose top-rank enhanced loss functions, which are more sensitive to ranking errors at higher positions. Experiments on a large-scale Chinese-English translation task show that both our listwise learning framework and top-rank enhanced listwise losses lead to significant improvements in translation quality.