304 research outputs found
Linguistically Motivated Vocabulary Reduction for Neural Machine Translation from Turkish to English
The necessity of using a fixed-size word vocabulary in order to control the
model complexity in state-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT) systems
is an important bottleneck on performance, especially for morphologically rich
languages. Conventional methods that aim to overcome this problem by using
sub-word or character-level representations solely rely on statistics and
disregard the linguistic properties of words, which leads to interruptions in
the word structure and causes semantic and syntactic losses. In this paper, we
propose a new vocabulary reduction method for NMT, which can reduce the
vocabulary of a given input corpus at any rate while also considering the
morphological properties of the language. Our method is based on unsupervised
morphology learning and can be, in principle, used for pre-processing any
language pair. We also present an alternative word segmentation method based on
supervised morphological analysis, which aids us in measuring the accuracy of
our model. We evaluate our method in Turkish-to-English NMT task where the
input language is morphologically rich and agglutinative. We analyze different
representation methods in terms of translation accuracy as well as the semantic
and syntactic properties of the generated output. Our method obtains a
significant improvement of 2.3 BLEU points over the conventional vocabulary
reduction technique, showing that it can provide better accuracy in open
vocabulary translation of morphologically rich languages.Comment: The 20th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine
Translation (EAMT), Research Paper, 12 page
A Syllable-based Technique for Word Embeddings of Korean Words
Word embedding has become a fundamental component to many NLP tasks such as
named entity recognition and machine translation. However, popular models that
learn such embeddings are unaware of the morphology of words, so it is not
directly applicable to highly agglutinative languages such as Korean. We
propose a syllable-based learning model for Korean using a convolutional neural
network, in which word representation is composed of trained syllable vectors.
Our model successfully produces morphologically meaningful representation of
Korean words compared to the original Skip-gram embeddings. The results also
show that it is quite robust to the Out-of-Vocabulary problem.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. Accepted for EMNLP 2017 Workshop - The
1st Workshop on Subword and Character level models in NLP (SCLeM
Finding Function in Form: Compositional Character Models for Open Vocabulary Word Representation
We introduce a model for constructing vector representations of words by
composing characters using bidirectional LSTMs. Relative to traditional word
representation models that have independent vectors for each word type, our
model requires only a single vector per character type and a fixed set of
parameters for the compositional model. Despite the compactness of this model
and, more importantly, the arbitrary nature of the form-function relationship
in language, our "composed" word representations yield state-of-the-art results
in language modeling and part-of-speech tagging. Benefits over traditional
baselines are particularly pronounced in morphologically rich languages (e.g.,
Turkish)
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