Multi-layer Representation Fusion for Neural Machine Translation

Qiang Wang, Fuxue Li, Tong Xiao, Yanyang Li, Yinqiao Li, Jingbo Zhu


Abstract
Neural machine translation systems require a number of stacked layers for deep models. But the prediction depends on the sentence representation of the top-most layer with no access to low-level representations. This makes it more difficult to train the model and poses a risk of information loss to prediction. In this paper, we propose a multi-layer representation fusion (MLRF) approach to fusing stacked layers. In particular, we design three fusion functions to learn a better representation from the stack. Experimental results show that our approach yields improvements of 0.92 and 0.56 BLEU points over the strong Transformer baseline on IWSLT German-English and NIST Chinese-English MT tasks respectively. The result is new state-of-the-art in German-English translation.
Anthology ID:
C18-1255
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3015–3026
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1255
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qiang Wang, Fuxue Li, Tong Xiao, Yanyang Li, Yinqiao Li, and Jingbo Zhu. 2018. Multi-layer Representation Fusion for Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3015–3026, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-layer Representation Fusion for Neural Machine Translation (Wang et al., COLING 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1255.pdf