End-to-End Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation with Connectionist Temporal Classification

Jindřich Libovický, Jindřich Helcl


Abstract
Autoregressive decoding is the only part of sequence-to-sequence models that prevents them from massive parallelization at inference time. Non-autoregressive models enable the decoder to generate all output symbols independently in parallel. We present a novel non-autoregressive architecture based on connectionist temporal classification and evaluate it on the task of neural machine translation. Unlike other non-autoregressive methods which operate in several steps, our model can be trained end-to-end. We conduct experiments on the WMT English-Romanian and English-German datasets. Our models achieve a significant speedup over the autoregressive models, keeping the translation quality comparable to other non-autoregressive models.
Anthology ID:
D18-1336
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3016–3021
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1336
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1336
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jindřich Libovický and Jindřich Helcl. 2018. End-to-End Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation with Connectionist Temporal Classification. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3016–3021, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
End-to-End Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation with Connectionist Temporal Classification (Libovický & Helcl, EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ml4al-ingestion/D18-1336.pdf
Data
WMT 2014WMT 2016