SYSTRAN Purely Neural MT Engines for WMT2017

This paper describes SYSTRAN's systems submitted to the WMT 2017 shared news translation task for English-German, in both translation directions. Our systems are built using OpenNMT, an open-source neural machine translation system, implementing sequence-to-sequence models with LSTM encoder/decoders and attention. We experimented using monolingual data automatically back-translated. Our resulting models are further hyper-specialised with an adaptation technique that finely tunes models according to the evaluation test sentences.Comment: Published in WMT 201

Approches quantitatives de l'analyse des pr{\'e}dictions en traduction automatique neuronale (TAN)

As part of a larger project on optimal learning conditions in neural machine translation, we investigate characteristic training phases of translation engines. All our experiments are carried out using OpenNMT-Py: the pre-processing step is implemented using the Europarl training corpus and the INTERSECT corpus is used for validation. Longitudinal analyses of training phases suggest that the progression of translations is not always linear. Following the results of textometric explorations, we identify the importance of the phenomena related to chronological progression, in order to map different processes at work in neural machine translation (NMT).Comment: in French. JADT 2020 : 15{\`e}mes Journ{\'e}es Internationales d'Analyse statistique des Donn{\'e}es Textuelles, Universit{\'e} de Toulouse, Jun 2020, Toulouse, Franc

Low-Resource Unsupervised NMT:Diagnosing the Problem and Providing a Linguistically Motivated Solution

Unsupervised Machine Translation hasbeen advancing our ability to translatewithout parallel data, but state-of-the-artmethods assume an abundance of mono-lingual data. This paper investigates thescenario where monolingual data is lim-ited as well, finding that current unsuper-vised methods suffer in performance un-der this stricter setting. We find that theperformance loss originates from the poorquality of the pretrained monolingual em-beddings, and we propose using linguis-tic information in the embedding train-ing scheme. To support this, we look attwo linguistic features that may help im-prove alignment quality: dependency in-formation and sub-word information. Us-ing dependency-based embeddings resultsin a complementary word representationwhich offers a boost in performance ofaround 1.5 BLEU points compared to stan-dardWORD2VECwhen monolingual datais limited to 1 million sentences per lan-guage. We also find that the inclusion ofsub-word information is crucial to improv-ing the quality of the embedding