10,586 research outputs found
Why Catalan-Spanish Neural Machine Translation? Analysis, comparison and combination with standard Rule and Phrase-based technologies
Catalan and Spanish are two related languages given that both derive from Latin. They share similarities in several linguistic levels including morphology, syntax and semantics. This makes them particularly interesting for the MT task. Given the recent appearance and popularity of neural MT, this paper analyzes the performance of this new approach compared to the well-established rule-based and phrase-based MT systems. Experiments are reported on a large database of 180 million words. Results, in terms of standard automatic measures, show that neural MT clearly outperforms the rule-based and phrase-based MT system on in-domain test set, but it is worst in the out-of-domain test set. A naive system combination specially works for the latter. In-domain manual analysis shows that neural MT tends to improve both adequacy and fluency, for example, by being able to generate more natural translations instead of literal ones, choosing to the adequate target word when the source word has several translations and improving gender agreement. However, out-of-domain manual analysis shows how neural MT is more affected by unknown words or contexts.Postprint (published version
Translating Phrases in Neural Machine Translation
Phrases play an important role in natural language understanding and machine
translation (Sag et al., 2002; Villavicencio et al., 2005). However, it is
difficult to integrate them into current neural machine translation (NMT) which
reads and generates sentences word by word. In this work, we propose a method
to translate phrases in NMT by integrating a phrase memory storing target
phrases from a phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) system into
the encoder-decoder architecture of NMT. At each decoding step, the phrase
memory is first re-written by the SMT model, which dynamically generates
relevant target phrases with contextual information provided by the NMT model.
Then the proposed model reads the phrase memory to make probability estimations
for all phrases in the phrase memory. If phrase generation is carried on, the
NMT decoder selects an appropriate phrase from the memory to perform phrase
translation and updates its decoding state by consuming the words in the
selected phrase. Otherwise, the NMT decoder generates a word from the
vocabulary as the general NMT decoder does. Experiment results on the Chinese
to English translation show that the proposed model achieves significant
improvements over the baseline on various test sets.Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 201
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