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Memory-augmented Neural Machine Translation

Yang Feng, Shiyue Zhang, Andi Zhang, Dong Wang, Andrew Abel


Abstract
Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved notable success in recent times, however it is also widely recognized that this approach has limitations with handling infrequent words and word pairs. This paper presents a novel memory-augmented NMT (M-NMT) architecture, which stores knowledge about how words (usually infrequently encountered ones) should be translated in a memory and then utilizes them to assist the neural model. We use this memory mechanism to combine the knowledge learned from a conventional statistical machine translation system and the rules learned by an NMT system, and also propose a solution for out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words based on this framework. Our experiments on two Chinese-English translation tasks demonstrated that the M-NMT architecture outperformed the NMT baseline by 9.0 and 2.7 BLEU points on the two tasks, respectively. Additionally, we found this architecture resulted in a much more effective OOV treatment compared to competitive methods.
Anthology ID:
D17-1146
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1390–1399
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1146
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1146
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Feng, Shiyue Zhang, Andi Zhang, Dong Wang, and Andrew Abel. 2017. Memory-augmented Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1390–1399, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Memory-augmented Neural Machine Translation (Feng et al., EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1146.pdf