scholarly journals A Neural Machine Translation Model for Arabic Dialects That Utilizes Multitask Learning (MTL)

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laith H. Baniata ◽  
Seyoung Park ◽  
Seong-Bae Park

In this research article, we study the problem of employing a neural machine translation model to translate Arabic dialects to Modern Standard Arabic. The proposed solution of the neural machine translation model is prompted by the recurrent neural network-based encoder-decoder neural machine translation model that has been proposed recently, which generalizes machine translation as sequence learning problems. We propose the development of a multitask learning (MTL) model which shares one decoder among language pairs, and every source language has a separate encoder. The proposed model can be applied to limited volumes of data as well as extensive amounts of data. Experiments carried out have shown that the proposed MTL model can ensure a higher quality of translation when compared to the individually learned model.

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (19) ◽  
pp. 6509
Author(s):  
Laith H. Baniata ◽  
Isaac. K. E. Ampomah ◽  
Seyoung Park

Languages that allow free word order, such as Arabic dialects, are of significant difficulty for neural machine translation (NMT) because of many scarce words and the inefficiency of NMT systems to translate these words. Unknown Word (UNK) tokens represent the out-of-vocabulary words for the reason that NMT systems run with vocabulary that has fixed size. Scarce words are encoded completely as sequences of subword pieces employing the Word-Piece Model. This research paper introduces the first Transformer-based neural machine translation model for Arabic vernaculars that employs subword units. The proposed solution is based on the Transformer model that has been presented lately. The use of subword units and shared vocabulary within the Arabic dialect (the source language) and modern standard Arabic (the target language) enhances the behavior of the multi-head attention sublayers for the encoder by obtaining the overall dependencies between words of input sentence for Arabic vernacular. Experiments are carried out from Levantine Arabic vernacular (LEV) to modern standard Arabic (MSA) and Maghrebi Arabic vernacular (MAG) to MSA, Gulf–MSA, Nile–MSA, Iraqi Arabic (IRQ) to MSA translation tasks. Extensive experiments confirm that the suggested model adequately addresses the unknown word issue and boosts the quality of translation from Arabic vernaculars to Modern standard Arabic (MSA).


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 2502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laith H. Baniata ◽  
Seyoung Park ◽  
Seong-Bae Park

The statistical machine translation for the Arabic language integrates external linguistic resources such as part-of-speech tags. The current research presents a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) - Conditional Random Fields (CRF) segment-level Arabic Dialect POS tagger model, which will be integrated into the Multitask Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model. The proposed solution for NMT is based on the recurrent neural network encoder-decoder NMT model that has been introduced recently. The study has proposed and developed a unified Multitask NMT model that shares an encoder between the two tasks; Arabic Dialect (AD) to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) translation task and the segment-level POS tagging tasks. A shared layer and an invariant layer are shared between the translation tasks. By training translation tasks and POS tagging task alternately, the proposed model can leverage the characteristic information and improve the translation quality from Arabic dialects to Modern Standard Arabic. The experiments are conducted from Levantine Arabic (LA) to MSA and Maghrebi Arabic (MA) to MSA translation tasks. As an additional linguistic resource, the segment-level part-of-speech tags for Arabic dialects were also exploited. Experiments suggest that translation quality and the performance of POS tagger were improved with the implementation of multitask learning approach.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (13) ◽  
pp. 1589
Author(s):  
Yongkeun Hwang ◽  
Yanghoon Kim ◽  
Kyomin Jung

Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the text generation tasks which has achieved significant improvement with the rise of deep neural networks. However, language-specific problems such as handling the translation of honorifics received little attention. In this paper, we propose a context-aware NMT to promote translation improvements of Korean honorifics. By exploiting the information such as the relationship between speakers from the surrounding sentences, our proposed model effectively manages the use of honorific expressions. Specifically, we utilize a novel encoder architecture that can represent the contextual information of the given input sentences. Furthermore, a context-aware post-editing (CAPE) technique is adopted to refine a set of inconsistent sentence-level honorific translations. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, honorific-labeled test data is required. Thus, we also design a heuristic that labels Korean sentences to distinguish between honorific and non-honorific styles. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms sentence-level NMT baselines both in overall translation quality and honorific translations.


Author(s):  
Raj Dabre ◽  
Atsushi Fujita

In encoder-decoder based sequence-to-sequence modeling, the most common practice is to stack a number of recurrent, convolutional, or feed-forward layers in the encoder and decoder. While the addition of each new layer improves the sequence generation quality, this also leads to a significant increase in the number of parameters. In this paper, we propose to share parameters across all layers thereby leading to a recurrently stacked sequence-to-sequence model. We report on an extensive case study on neural machine translation (NMT) using our proposed method, experimenting with a variety of datasets. We empirically show that the translation quality of a model that recurrently stacks a single-layer 6 times, despite its significantly fewer parameters, approaches that of a model that stacks 6 different layers. We also show how our method can benefit from a prevalent way for improving NMT, i.e., extending training data with pseudo-parallel corpora generated by back-translation. We then analyze the effects of recurrently stacked layers by visualizing the attentions of models that use recurrently stacked layers and models that do not. Finally, we explore the limits of parameter sharing where we share even the parameters between the encoder and decoder in addition to recurrent stacking of layers.


Author(s):  
Yang Zhao ◽  
Jiajun Zhang ◽  
Yu Zhou ◽  
Chengqing Zong

Knowledge graphs (KGs) store much structured information on various entities, many of which are not covered by the parallel sentence pairs of neural machine translation (NMT). To improve the translation quality of these entities, in this paper we propose a novel KGs enhanced NMT method. Specifically, we first induce the new translation results of these entities by transforming the source and target KGs into a unified semantic space. We then generate adequate pseudo parallel sentence pairs that contain these induced entity pairs. Finally, NMT model is jointly trained by the original and pseudo sentence pairs. The extensive experiments on Chinese-to-English and Englishto-Japanese translation tasks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the strong baseline models in translation quality, especially in handling the induced entities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 8830-8837
Author(s):  
Xin Sheng ◽  
Linli Xu ◽  
Junliang Guo ◽  
Jingchang Liu ◽  
Ruoyu Zhao ◽  
...  

We propose a novel introspective model for variational neural machine translation (IntroVNMT) in this paper, inspired by the recent successful application of introspective variational autoencoder (IntroVAE) in high quality image synthesis. Different from the vanilla variational NMT model, IntroVNMT is capable of improving itself introspectively by evaluating the quality of the generated target sentences according to the high-level latent variables of the real and generated target sentences. As a consequence of introspective training, the proposed model is able to discriminate between the generated and real sentences of the target language via the latent variables generated by the encoder of the model. In this way, IntroVNMT is able to generate more realistic target sentences in practice. In the meantime, IntroVNMT inherits the advantages of the variational autoencoders (VAEs), and the model training process is more stable than the generative adversarial network (GAN) based models. Experimental results on different translation tasks demonstrate that the proposed model can achieve significant improvements over the vanilla variational NMT model.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (01) ◽  
pp. 2050002
Author(s):  
Taichi Aida ◽  
Kazuhide Yamamoto

Current methods of neural machine translation may generate sentences with different levels of quality. Methods for automatically evaluating translation output from machine translation can be broadly classified into two types: a method that uses human post-edited translations for training an evaluation model, and a method that uses a reference translation that is the correct answer during evaluation. On the one hand, it is difficult to prepare post-edited translations because it is necessary to tag each word in comparison with the original translated sentences. On the other hand, users who actually employ the machine translation system do not have a correct reference translation. Therefore, we propose a method that trains the evaluation model without using human post-edited sentences and in the test set, estimates the quality of output sentences without using reference translations. We define some indices and predict the quality of translations with a regression model. For the quality of the translated sentences, we employ the BLEU score calculated from the number of word [Formula: see text]-gram matches between the translated sentence and the reference translation. After that, we compute the correlation between quality scores predicted by our method and BLEU actually computed from references. According to the experimental results, the correlation with BLEU is the highest when XGBoost uses all the indices. Moreover, looking at each index, we find that the sentence log-likelihood and the model uncertainty, which are based on the joint probability of generating the translated sentence, are important in BLEU estimation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 145-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zaixiang Zheng ◽  
Hao Zhou ◽  
Shujian Huang ◽  
Lili Mou ◽  
Xinyu Dai ◽  
...  

Existing neural machine translation systems do not explicitly model what has been translated and what has not during the decoding phase. To address this problem, we propose a novel mechanism that separates the source information into two parts: translated Past contents and untranslated Future contents, which are modeled by two additional recurrent layers. The Past and Future contents are fed to both the attention model and the decoder states, which provides Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems with the knowledge of translated and untranslated contents. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance in Chinese-English, German-English, and English-German translation tasks. Specifically, the proposed model outperforms the conventional coverage model in terms of both the translation quality and the alignment error rate.


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