Chao Tian


2020

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Train Once, and Decode As You Like
Chao Tian | Yifei Wang | Hao Cheng | Yijiang Lian | Zhihua Zhang
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

In this paper we propose a unified approach for supporting different generation manners of machine translation, including autoregressive, semi-autoregressive, and refinement-based non-autoregressive models. Our approach works by repeatedly selecting positions and generating tokens at these selected positions. After being trained once, our approach achieves better or competitive translation performance compared with some strong task-specific baseline models in all the settings. This generalization ability benefits mainly from the new training objective that we propose. We validate our approach on the WMT’14 English-German and IWSLT’14 German-English translation tasks. The experimental results are encouraging.