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Incorporating Phrase-Level Agreement into Neural Machine Translation

  • School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology
  • Tencent
  • Soochow University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Phrase information has been successfully integrated into current state-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT) models. However, the natural property of the source and target phrase alignment has not been explored. In this paper, we propose a novel phrase-level agreement method to deal with this problem. First, we explore n-gram models over minimal translation units (MTUs) to explicitly capture aligned bilingual phrases from the parallel corpora. Then, we propose a phrase-level agreement loss that directly reduces the difference between the representations of the source-side and target-side phrase. Finally, we integrate the phrase-level agreement loss into the NMT models, to improve the translation performance. Empirical results on the NIST Chinese-to-English and the WMT English-to-German translation tasks demonstrate that the proposed phrase-level agreement method achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness and necessity of exploiting phrase-level agreement for NMT.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNatural Language Processing and Chinese Computing - 9th CCF International Conference, NLPCC 2020, Proceedings
EditorsXiaodan Zhu, Min Zhang, Yu Hong, Ruifang He
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages416-428
Number of pages13
ISBN (Print)9783030604493
DOIs
StatePublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event9th CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2020 - Zhengzhou, China
Duration: 14 Oct 202018 Oct 2020

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12430 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference9th CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2020
Country/TerritoryChina
CityZhengzhou
Period14/10/2018/10/20

Keywords

  • Minimal translation units
  • Neural machine translation
  • Phrase-level agreement

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