Improving Neural Machine Translation by Achieving Knowledge Transfer with Sentence Alignment Learning

Xuewen Shi, Heyan Huang, Wenguan Wang, Ping Jian, Yi-Kun Tang


Abstract
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) optimized by Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) lacks the guarantee of translation adequacy. To alleviate this problem, we propose an NMT approach that heightens the adequacy in machine translation by transferring the semantic knowledge learned from bilingual sentence alignment. Specifically, we first design a discriminator that learns to estimate sentence aligning score over translation candidates, and then the learned semantic knowledge is transfered to the NMT model under an adversarial learning framework. We also propose a gated self-attention based encoder for sentence embedding. Furthermore, an N-pair training loss is introduced in our framework to aid the discriminator in better capturing lexical evidence in translation candidates. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms baseline NMT models on Chinese-to-English and English-to-German translation tasks. Further analysis also indicates the detailed semantic knowledge transfered from the discriminator to the NMT model.
Anthology ID:
K19-1025
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Mohit Bansal, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
260–270
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1025
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K19-1025
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuewen Shi, Heyan Huang, Wenguan Wang, Ping Jian, and Yi-Kun Tang. 2019. Improving Neural Machine Translation by Achieving Knowledge Transfer with Sentence Alignment Learning. In Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pages 260–270, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Neural Machine Translation by Achieving Knowledge Transfer with Sentence Alignment Learning (Shi et al., CoNLL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1025.pdf