Bilingual Subword Segmentation for Neural Machine Translation
Hiroyuki Deguchi, Masao Utiyama, Akihiro Tamura, Takashi Ninomiya, Eiichiro Sumita
Abstract
This paper proposed a new subword segmentation method for neural machine translation, “Bilingual Subword Segmentation,” which tokenizes sentences to minimize the difference between the number of subword units in a sentence and that of its translation. While existing subword segmentation methods tokenize a sentence without considering its translation, the proposed method tokenizes a sentence by using subword units induced from bilingual sentences; this method could be more favorable to machine translation. Evaluations on WAT Asian Scientific Paper Excerpt Corpus (ASPEC) English-to-Japanese and Japanese-to-English translation tasks and WMT14 English-to-German and German-to-English translation tasks show that our bilingual subword segmentation improves the performance of Transformer neural machine translation (up to +0.81 BLEU).- Anthology ID:
- 2020.coling-main.378
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Barcelona, Spain (Online)
- Editors:
- Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
- Venue:
- COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- International Committee on Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4287–4297
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.378
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.378
- Cite (ACL):
- Hiroyuki Deguchi, Masao Utiyama, Akihiro Tamura, Takashi Ninomiya, and Eiichiro Sumita. 2020. Bilingual Subword Segmentation for Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4287–4297, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Bilingual Subword Segmentation for Neural Machine Translation (Deguchi et al., COLING 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.coling-main.378.pdf