Generating Diverse Translations with Sentence Codes

Raphael Shu, Hideki Nakayama, Kyunghyun Cho


Abstract
Users of machine translation systems may desire to obtain multiple candidates translated in different ways. In this work, we attempt to obtain diverse translations by using sentence codes to condition the sentence generation. We describe two methods to extract the codes, either with or without the help of syntax information. For diverse generation, we sample multiple candidates, each of which conditioned on a unique code. Experiments show that the sampled translations have much higher diversity scores when using reasonable sentence codes, where the translation quality is still on par with the baselines even under strong constraint imposed by the codes. In qualitative analysis, we show that our method is able to generate paraphrase translations with drastically different structures. The proposed approach can be easily adopted to existing translation systems as no modification to the model is required.
Anthology ID:
P19-1177
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1823–1827
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1177
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1177
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Raphael Shu, Hideki Nakayama, and Kyunghyun Cho. 2019. Generating Diverse Translations with Sentence Codes. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1823–1827, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Diverse Translations with Sentence Codes (Shu et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1177.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1177.mp4
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