Character-level Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have recently
achieved impressive results on many language pairs. They mainly do well for
Indo-European language pairs, where the languages share the same writing
system. However, for translating between Chinese and English, the gap between
the two different writing systems poses a major challenge because of a lack of
systematic correspondence between the individual linguistic units. In this
paper, we enable character-level NMT for Chinese, by breaking down Chinese
characters into linguistic units similar to that of Indo-European languages. We
use the Wubi encoding scheme, which preserves the original shape and semantic
information of the characters, while also being reversible. We show promising
results from training Wubi-based models on the character- and subword-level
with recurrent as well as convolutional models.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 3rd Conference on Machine Translation (WMT18),
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