Document-Level Neural Machine Translation with Hierarchical Attention Networks

Lesly Miculicich, Dhananjay Ram, Nikolaos Pappas, James Henderson


Abstract
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) can be improved by including document-level contextual information. For this purpose, we propose a hierarchical attention model to capture the context in a structured and dynamic manner. The model is integrated in the original NMT architecture as another level of abstraction, conditioning on the NMT model’s own previous hidden states. Experiments show that hierarchical attention significantly improves the BLEU score over a strong NMT baseline with the state-of-the-art in context-aware methods, and that both the encoder and decoder benefit from context in complementary ways.
Anthology ID:
D18-1325
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:
2947–2954
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1325
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1325
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lesly Miculicich, Dhananjay Ram, Nikolaos Pappas, and James Henderson. 2018. Document-Level Neural Machine Translation with Hierarchical Attention Networks. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2947–2954, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Document-Level Neural Machine Translation with Hierarchical Attention Networks (Miculicich et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/D18-1325.pdf
Attachment:
 D18-1325.Attachment.pdf
Code
 idiap/HAN_NMT +  additional community code