This work presents a novel approach to jointly tackling Automatic Post-Editing (APE) and Word-Level Quality Estimation (QE) using ensembles of specialized Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems. Word-level features which have proven effective for QE are included as input factors, expanding the representation of the original source and the machine translation hypothesis, which are used to generate an automatically post-edited hypothesis. We train a suite of NMT models which use different input representations, but share the same output space. These models are then ensembled together, and tuned for both the APE and the QE task. We thus attempt to connect the state-of-the-art approaches to APE and QE within a single framework. Our models achieve state-of-the-art results in both tasks, with the only difference in the tuning step which learns weights for each component of the ensemble.
Alexandrescu and Kirchoff introduced linguistic factors for neural language models. The core idea is to learn embeddings for linguistic features such as part-of-speech (POS) tags and dependency labels, augmenting the word embeddings of the input with additional features. Recent work has shown that NMT performance can also be improved by concatenating embeddings for additional word-level "factors" to source-word input embeddings @cite_1 . The input representation @math for each source input @math with factors @math thus becomes Eq. :
@cite_1
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We present a new approach for neural machine translation (NMT) using the morphological and grammatical decomposition of the words (factors) in the output side of the neural network. This architecture addresses two main problems occurring in MT, namely dealing with a large target language vocabulary and the out of vocabulary (OOV) words. By the means of factors, we are able to handle larger vocabulary and reduce the training time (for systems with equivalent target language vocabulary size). In addition, we can produce new words that are not in the vocabulary. We use a morphological analyser to get a factored representation of each word (lemmas, Part of Speech tag, tense, person, gender and number). We have extended the NMT approach with attention mechanism in order to have two different outputs, one for the lemmas and the other for the rest of the factors. The final translation is built using some linguistic information. We compare our extension with a word-based NMT system. The experiments, performed on the IWSLT'15 dataset translating from English to French, show that while the performance do not always increase, the system can manage a much larger vocabulary and consistently reduce the OOV rate. We observe up to 2 BLEU point improvement in a simulated out of domain translation setup. Neural machine translation (NMT) heavily relies on word-level modelling to learn semantic representations of input sentences. However, for languages without natural word delimiters (e.g., Chinese) where input sentences have to be tokenized first, conventional NMT is confronted with two issues: 1) it is difficult to find an optimal tokenization granularity for source sentence modelling, and 2) errors in 1-best tokenizations may propagate to the encoder of NMT. To handle these issues, we propose word-lattice based Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) encoders for NMT, which generalize the standard RNN to word lattice topology. The proposed encoders take as input a word lattice that compactly encodes multiple tokenizations, and learn to generate new hidden states from arbitrarily many inputs and hidden states in preceding time steps. As such, the word-lattice based encoders not only alleviate the negative impact of tokenization errors but also are more expressive and flexible to embed input sentences. Experiment results on Chinese-English translation demonstrate the superiorities of the proposed encoders over the conventional encoder. While neural machine translation (NMT) models provide improved translation quality in an elegant, end-to-end framework, it is less clear what they learn about language. Recent work has started evaluating the quality of vector representations learned by NMT models on morphological and syntactic tasks. In this paper, we investigate the representations learned at different layers of NMT encoders. We train NMT systems on parallel data and use the trained models to extract features for training a classifier on two tasks: part-of-speech and semantic tagging. We then measure the performance of the classifier as a proxy to the quality of the original NMT model for the given task. Our quantitative analysis yields interesting insights regarding representation learning in NMT models. For instance, we find that higher layers are better at learning semantics while lower layers tend to be better for part-of-speech tagging. We also observe little effect of the target language on source-side representations, especially with higher quality NMT models. In this paper, we enhance the attention-based neural machine translation (NMT) by adding explicit coverage embedding models to alleviate issues of repeating and dropping translations in NMT. For each source word, our model starts with a full coverage embedding vector to track the coverage status, and then keeps updating it with neural networks as the translation goes. Experiments on the large-scale Chinese-to-English task show that our enhanced model improves the translation quality significantly on various test sets over the strong large vocabulary NMT system.