While end-to-end neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved impressive progress, noisy input usually leads models to become fragile and unstable. Generating adversarial examples as the augmented data has been proved to be useful to alleviate this problem. Existing methods for adversarial example generation (AEG) are word-level or character-level, which ignore the ubiquitous phrase structure. In this paper, we propose a Phrase-level Adversarial Example Generation (PAEG) framework to enhance the robustness of the translation model. Our method further improves the gradient-based word-level AEG method by adopting a phrase-level substitution strategy. We verify our method on three benchmarks, including LDC Chinese-English, IWSLT14 German-English, and WMT14 English-German tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves translation performance and robustness to noise compared to previous strong baselines.

Span-based methods with the neural networks backbone have great potential for the nested named entity recognition (NER) problem. However, they face problems such as degenerating when positive instances and negative instances largely overlap. Besides, the generalization ability matters a lot in nested NER, as a large proportion of entities in the test set hardly appear in the training set. In this work, we try to improve the span representation by utilizing retrieval-based span-level graphs, connecting spans and entities in the training data based on n-gram features. Specifically, we build the entity-entity graph and span-entity graph globally based on n-gram similarity to integrate the information of similar neighbor entities into the span representation. To evaluate our method, we conduct experiments on three common nested NER datasets, ACE2004, ACE2005, and GENIA datasets. Experimental results show that our method achieves general improvements on all three benchmarks (+0.30 ∼ 0.85 micro-F1), and obtains special superiority on low frequency entities (+0.56 ∼ 2.08 recall).

Most current neural machine translation models adopt a monotonic decoding order of either left-to-right or right-to-left. In this work, we propose a novel method that breaks up the limitation of these decoding orders, called Smart-Start decoding. More specifically, our method first predicts a median word. It starts to decode the words on the right side of the median word and then generates words on the left. We evaluate the proposed Smart-Start decoding method on three datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly outperform strong baseline models.