38 research outputs found

    Sequence to Sequence Mixture Model for Diverse Machine Translation

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    Sequence to sequence (SEQ2SEQ) models often lack diversity in their generated translations. This can be attributed to the limitation of SEQ2SEQ models in capturing lexical and syntactic variations in a parallel corpus resulting from different styles, genres, topics, or ambiguity of the translation process. In this paper, we develop a novel sequence to sequence mixture (S2SMIX) model that improves both translation diversity and quality by adopting a committee of specialized translation models rather than a single translation model. Each mixture component selects its own training dataset via optimization of the marginal loglikelihood, which leads to a soft clustering of the parallel corpus. Experiments on four language pairs demonstrate the superiority of our mixture model compared to a SEQ2SEQ baseline with standard or diversity-boosted beam search. Our mixture model uses negligible additional parameters and incurs no extra computation cost during decoding.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, accepted to CoNLL201

    Dynamic Sentence Sampling for Efficient Training of Neural Machine Translation

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    Traditional Neural machine translation (NMT) involves a fixed training procedure where each sentence is sampled once during each epoch. In reality, some sentences are well-learned during the initial few epochs; however, using this approach, the well-learned sentences would continue to be trained along with those sentences that were not well learned for 10-30 epochs, which results in a wastage of time. Here, we propose an efficient method to dynamically sample the sentences in order to accelerate the NMT training. In this approach, a weight is assigned to each sentence based on the measured difference between the training costs of two iterations. Further, in each epoch, a certain percentage of sentences are dynamically sampled according to their weights. Empirical results based on the NIST Chinese-to-English and the WMT English-to-German tasks depict that the proposed method can significantly accelerate the NMT training and improve the NMT performance.Comment: Revised version of ACL-201
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