Colin McDonald


2021

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Syntax-Based Attention Masking for Neural Machine Translation
Colin McDonald | David Chiang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

We present a simple method for extending transformers to source-side trees. We define a number of masks that limit self-attention based on relationships among tree nodes, and we allow each attention head to learn which mask or masks to use. On translation from English to various low-resource languages, and translation in both directions between English and German, our method always improves over simple linearization of the source-side parse tree and almost always improves over a sequence-to-sequence baseline, by up to +2.1 BLEU.
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