LIUM Machine Translation Systems for WMT17 News Translation Task

This paper describes LIUM submissions to WMT17 News Translation Task for English-German, English-Turkish, English-Czech and English-Latvian language pairs. We train BPE-based attentive Neural Machine Translation systems with and without factored outputs using the open source nmtpy framework. Competitive scores were obtained by ensembling various systems and exploiting the availability of target monolingual corpora for back-translation. The impact of back-translation quantity and quality is also analyzed for English-Turkish where our post-deadline submission surpassed the best entry by +1.6 BLEU.Comment: News Translation Task System Description paper for WMT1

Stochastic Language Generation in Dialogue using Recurrent Neural Networks with Convolutional Sentence Reranking

The natural language generation (NLG) component of a spoken dialogue system (SDS) usually needs a substantial amount of handcrafting or a well-labeled dataset to be trained on. These limitations add significantly to development costs and make cross-domain, multi-lingual dialogue systems intractable. Moreover, human languages are context-aware. The most natural response should be directly learned from data rather than depending on predefined syntaxes or rules. This paper presents a statistical language generator based on a joint recurrent and convolutional neural network structure which can be trained on dialogue act-utterance pairs without any semantic alignments or predefined grammar trees. Objective metrics suggest that this new model outperforms previous methods under the same experimental conditions. Results of an evaluation by human judges indicate that it produces not only high quality but linguistically varied utterances which are preferred compared to n-gram and rule-based systems.Comment: To be appear in SigDial 201

Neural Reranking for Named Entity Recognition

We propose a neural reranking system for named entity recognition (NER). The basic idea is to leverage recurrent neural network models to learn sentence-level patterns that involve named entity mentions. In particular, given an output sentence produced by a baseline NER model, we replace all entity mentions, such as \textit{Barack Obama}, into their entity types, such as \textit{PER}. The resulting sentence patterns contain direct output information, yet is less sparse without specific named entities. For example, "PER was born in LOC" can be such a pattern. LSTM and CNN structures are utilised for learning deep representations of such sentences for reranking. Results show that our system can significantly improve the NER accuracies over two different baselines, giving the best reported results on a standard benchmark.Comment: Accepted as regular paper by RANLP 201