What do Neural Machine Translation Models Learn about Morphology?

Yonatan Belinkov, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi, Hassan Sajjad, James Glass


Abstract
Neural machine translation (MT) models obtain state-of-the-art performance while maintaining a simple, end-to-end architecture. However, little is known about what these models learn about source and target languages during the training process. In this work, we analyze the representations learned by neural MT models at various levels of granularity and empirically evaluate the quality of the representations for learning morphology through extrinsic part-of-speech and morphological tagging tasks. We conduct a thorough investigation along several parameters: word-based vs. character-based representations, depth of the encoding layer, the identity of the target language, and encoder vs. decoder representations. Our data-driven, quantitative evaluation sheds light on important aspects in the neural MT system and its ability to capture word structure.
Anthology ID:
P17-1080
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
861–872
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1080
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1080
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yonatan Belinkov, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi, Hassan Sajjad, and James Glass. 2017. What do Neural Machine Translation Models Learn about Morphology?. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 861–872, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What do Neural Machine Translation Models Learn about Morphology? (Belinkov et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1080.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P17-1080.mp4
Code
 boknilev/nmt-repr-analysis