Context-Aware Smoothing for Neural Machine Translation
Kehai Chen, Rui Wang, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita, Tiejun Zhao
Abstract
In Neural Machine Translation (NMT), each word is represented as a low-dimension, real-value vector for encoding its syntax and semantic information. This means that even if the word is in a different sentence context, it is represented as the fixed vector to learn source representation. Moreover, a large number of Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words, which have different syntax and semantic information, are represented as the same vector representation of “unk”. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel context-aware smoothing method to dynamically learn a sentence-specific vector for each word (including OOV words) depending on its local context words in a sentence. The learned context-aware representation is integrated into the NMT to improve the translation performance. Empirical results on NIST Chinese-to-English translation task show that the proposed approach achieves 1.78 BLEU improvements on average over a strong attentional NMT, and outperforms some existing systems.- Anthology ID:
 - I17-1002
 - Volume:
 - Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
 - Month:
 - November
 - Year:
 - 2017
 - Address:
 - Taipei, Taiwan
 - Editors:
 - Greg Kondrak, Taro Watanabe
 - Venue:
 - IJCNLP
 - SIG:
 - Publisher:
 - Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing
 - Note:
 - Pages:
 - 11–20
 - Language:
 - URL:
 - https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/I17-1002/
 - DOI:
 - Cite (ACL):
 - Kehai Chen, Rui Wang, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita, and Tiejun Zhao. 2017. Context-Aware Smoothing for Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 11–20, Taipei, Taiwan. Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing.
 - Cite (Informal):
 - Context-Aware Smoothing for Neural Machine Translation (Chen et al., IJCNLP 2017)
 - PDF:
 - https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/I17-1002.pdf