Modeling Recurrence for Transformer
Jie Hao, Xing Wang, Baosong Yang, Longyue Wang, Jinfeng Zhang, Zhaopeng Tu
Abstract
Recently, the Transformer model that is based solely on attention mechanisms, has advanced the state-of-the-art on various machine translation tasks. However, recent studies reveal that the lack of recurrence modeling hinders its further improvement of translation capacity. In response to this problem, we propose to directly model recurrence for Transformer with an additional recurrence encoder. In addition to the standard recurrent neural network, we introduce a novel attentive recurrent network to leverage the strengths of both attention models and recurrent networks. Experimental results on the widely-used WMT14 English⇒German and WMT17 Chinese⇒English translation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our studies also reveal that the proposed model benefits from a short-cut that bridges the source and target sequences with a single recurrent layer, which outperforms its deep counterpart.- Anthology ID:
- N19-1122
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Minneapolis, Minnesota
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1198–1207
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/N19-1122
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/N19-1122
- Cite (ACL):
- Jie Hao, Xing Wang, Baosong Yang, Longyue Wang, Jinfeng Zhang, and Zhaopeng Tu. 2019. Modeling Recurrence for Transformer. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1198–1207, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Modeling Recurrence for Transformer (Hao et al., NAACL 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nodalida-main-page/N19-1122.pdf