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://aclanthology.org/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/nschneid-patch-1/I17-1002.pdf