In this work, we propose a novel, implicitly-defined neural network architecture and describe a method to compute its components. The proposed architecture forgoes the causality assumption used to formulate recurrent neural networks and instead couples the hidden states of the network, allowing improvement on problems with complex, long-distance dependencies. Initial experiments demonstrate the new architecture outperforms both the Stanford Parser and baseline bidirectional networks on the Penn Treebank Part-of-Speech tagging task and a baseline bidirectional network on an additional artificial random biased walk task.

This report summarizes the MITLL-AFRL MT and ASR systems and the experiments run during the 2016 IWSLT evaluation campaign. Building on lessons learned from previous years’ results, we refine our ASR systems and examine the explosion of neural machine translation systems and techniques developed in the past year. We experiment with a variety of phrase-based, hierarchical and neural-network approaches in machine translation and utilize system combination to create a composite system with the best characteristics of all attempted MT approaches.

This report summarizes the MITLL-AFRL MT and ASR systems and the experiments run using them during the 2014 IWSLT evaluation campaign. Our MT system is much improved over last year, owing to integration of techniques such as PRO and DREM optimization, factored language models, neural network joint model rescoring, multiple phrase tables, and development set creation. We focused our eforts this year on the tasks of translating from Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and Farsi into English, as well as translating from English to French. ASR performance also improved, partly due to increased eforts with deep neural networks for hybrid and tandem systems. Work focused on both the English and Italian ASR tasks.

This paper describes the MIT-LL/AFRL statistical MT system and the improvements that were developed during the IWSLT 2013 evaluation campaign [1]. As part of these efforts, we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance on the Russian to English, Chinese to English, Arabic to English, and English to French TED-talk translation task. We also applied our existing ASR system to the TED-talk lecture ASR task. We discuss the architecture of the MIT-LL/AFRL MT system, improvements over our 2012 system, and experiments we ran during the IWSLT-2013 evaluation. Specifically, we focus on 1) cross-entropy filtering of MT training data, and 2) improved optimization techniques, 3) language modeling, and 4) approximation of out-of-vocabulary words.