In this paper, we extend an attention-based neural machine translation (NMT) model by allowing it to access an entire training set of parallel sentence pairs even after training. The proposed approach consists of two stages. In the first stage--retrieval stage--, an off-the-shelf, black-box search engine is used to retrieve a small subset of sentence pairs from a training set given a source sentence. These pairs are further filtered based on a fuzzy matching score based on edit distance. In the second stage--translation stage--, a novel translation model, called translation memory enhanced NMT (TM-NMT), seamlessly uses both the source sentence and a set of retrieved sentence pairs to perform the translation. Empirical evaluation on three language pairs (En-Fr, En-De, and En-Es) shows that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the baseline approach and the improvement is more significant when more relevant sentence pairs were retrieved.
One important property of the proposed SEG-NMT is that it relies on an external, black-box search engine to retrieve relevant translation pairs. Such a search engine is used both during training and testing, and an obvious next step is to allow the proposed SEG-NMT to more intelligently query the search engine, for instance, by reformulating a given source sentence. Recently, @cite_4 proposed task-oriented query reformulation in which a neural network is trained to use a black-box search engine to maximize the recall of relevant documents, which can be integrated into the proposed SEG-NMT. We leave this as future work.
@cite_4
2607188338
Search engines play an important role in our everyday lives by assisting us in finding the information we need. When we input a complex query, however, results are often far from satisfactory. In this work, we introduce a query reformulation system based on a neural network that rewrites a query to maximize the number of relevant documents returned. We train this neural network with reinforcement learning. The actions correspond to selecting terms to build a reformulated query, and the reward is the document recall. We evaluate our approach on three datasets against strong baselines and show a relative improvement of 5-20 in terms of recall. Furthermore, we present a simple method to estimate a conservative upper-bound performance of a model in a particular environment and verify that there is still large room for improvements.