Learning Semantic Representations for the Phrase Translation Model

This paper presents a novel semantic-based phrase translation model. A pair of source and target phrases are projected into continuous-valued vector representations in a low-dimensional latent semantic space, where their translation score is computed by the distance between the pair in this new space. The projection is performed by a multi-layer neural network whose weights are learned on parallel training data. The learning is aimed to directly optimize the quality of end-to-end machine translation results. Experimental evaluation has been performed on two Europarl translation tasks, English-French and German-English. The results show that the new semantic-based phrase translation model significantly improves the performance of a state-of-the-art phrase-based statistical machine translation sys-tem, leading to a gain of 0.7-1.0 BLEU points

Are BLEU and Meaning Representation in Opposition?

One of possible ways of obtaining continuous-space sentence representations is by training neural machine translation (NMT) systems. The recent attention mechanism however removes the single point in the neural network from which the source sentence representation can be extracted. We propose several variations of the attentive NMT architecture bringing this meeting point back. Empirical evaluation suggests that the better the translation quality, the worse the learned sentence representations serve in a wide range of classification and similarity tasks.Comment: ACL 2018; 10 pages + 2 page supplementar

Are BLEU and Meaning Representation in Opposition?

One of possible ways of obtaining continuous-space sentence representations is by training neural machine translation (NMT) systems. The recent attention mechanism however removes the single point in the neural network from which the source sentence representation can be extracted. We propose several variations of the attentive NMT architecture bringing this meeting point back. Empirical evaluation suggests that the better the translation quality, the worse the learned sentence representations serve in a wide range of classification and similarity tasks.Comment: ACL 2018; 10 pages + 2 page supplementar