Named Entity-Factored Transformer for Proper Noun Translation

Kohichi Takai, Gen Hattori, Akio Yoneyama, Keiji Yasuda, Katsuhito Sudoh, Satoshi Nakamura


Abstract
Subword-based neural machine translation decreases the number of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words and also keeps the translation quality if input sentences include OOV words. The subword-based NMT decomposes a word into shorter units to solve the OOV problem, but it does not work well for non-compositional proper nouns due to the construction of the shorter unit from words. Furthermore, the lack of translation also occurs in proper noun translation. The proposed method applies the Named Entity (NE) fea-ture vector to Factored Transformer for accurate proper noun translation. The proposed method uses two features which are input sentences in subwords unit and the feature obtained from Named Entity Recognition (NER). The pro-posed method improves the problem of non-compositional proper nouns translation included a low-frequency word. According to the experiments, the proposed method using the best NE feature vector outperformed the baseline sub-word-based transformer model by more than 9.6 points in proper noun accuracy and 2.5 points in the BLEU score.
Anthology ID:
2021.icon-main.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)
Month:
December
Year:
2021
Address:
National Institute of Technology Silchar, Silchar, India
Editors:
Sivaji Bandyopadhyay, Sobha Lalitha Devi, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Venue:
ICON
SIG:
Publisher:
NLP Association of India (NLPAI)
Note:
Pages:
7–11
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.icon-main.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kohichi Takai, Gen Hattori, Akio Yoneyama, Keiji Yasuda, Katsuhito Sudoh, and Satoshi Nakamura. 2021. Named Entity-Factored Transformer for Proper Noun Translation. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON), pages 7–11, National Institute of Technology Silchar, Silchar, India. NLP Association of India (NLPAI).
Cite (Informal):
Named Entity-Factored Transformer for Proper Noun Translation (Takai et al., ICON 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.icon-main.2.pdf
Data
JParaCrawl