Guiding Neural Machine Translation with Retrieved Translation Pieces

Jingyi Zhang, Masao Utiyama, Eiichro Sumita, Graham Neubig, Satoshi Nakamura


Abstract
One of the difficulties of neural machine translation (NMT) is the recall and appropriate translation of low-frequency words or phrases. In this paper, we propose a simple, fast, and effective method for recalling previously seen translation examples and incorporating them into the NMT decoding process. Specifically, for an input sentence, we use a search engine to retrieve sentence pairs whose source sides are similar with the input sentence, and then collect n-grams that are both in the retrieved target sentences and aligned with words that match in the source sentences, which we call “translation pieces”. We compute pseudo-probabilities for each retrieved sentence based on similarities between the input sentence and the retrieved source sentences, and use these to weight the retrieved translation pieces. Finally, an existing NMT model is used to translate the input sentence, with an additional bonus given to outputs that contain the collected translation pieces. We show our method improves NMT translation results up to 6 BLEU points on three narrow domain translation tasks where repetitiveness of the target sentences is particularly salient. It also causes little increase in the translation time, and compares favorably to another alternative retrieval-based method with respect to accuracy, speed, and simplicity of implementation.
Anthology ID:
N18-1120
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1325–1335
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1120
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1120
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jingyi Zhang, Masao Utiyama, Eiichro Sumita, Graham Neubig, and Satoshi Nakamura. 2018. Guiding Neural Machine Translation with Retrieved Translation Pieces. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 1325–1335, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Guiding Neural Machine Translation with Retrieved Translation Pieces (Zhang et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1120.pdf