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Pre-reordering for neural machine translation: helpful or harmful?

Du, Jinhua orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-3267-4881 and Way, Andy orcid logoORCID: 0000-0001-5736-5930 (2017) Pre-reordering for neural machine translation: helpful or harmful? Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics (108). pp. 171-181. ISSN 1804-0462

Abstract
Pre-reordering, a preprocessing to make the source-side word orders close to those of the target side, has been proven very helpful for statistical machine translation (SMT) in improving translation quality. However, is it the case in neural machine translation (NMT)? In this paper, we firstly investigate the impact of pre-reordered source-side data on NMT, and then propose to incorporate features for the pre-reordering model in SMT as input factors into NMT (factored NMT). The features, namely parts-of-speech (POS), word class and reordered index, are encoded as feature vectors and concatenated to the word embeddings to provide extra knowledge for NMT. Pre-reordering experiments conducted on Japanese↔English and Chinese↔English show that pre-reordering the source-side data for NMT is redundant and NMT models trained on pre-reordered data deteriorate translation performance. However, factored NMT using SMT-based pre-reordering features on Japanese→English and Chinese→English is beneficial and can further improve by 4.48 and 5.89 relative BLEU points, respectively, compared to the baseline NMT system.
Metadata
Item Type:Article (Published)
Refereed:Yes
Subjects:Computer Science > Machine translating
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Research Institutes and Centres > ADAPT
Publisher:De Gruyter Open
Official URL:http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1515/pralin-2017-0018
Copyright Information:© 2017 PBML. Distributed under CC BY-NC-ND.
Use License:This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. View License
Funders:Science Foundation Ireland Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106).
ID Code:23314
Deposited On:20 May 2019 08:53 by Thomas Murtagh . Last Modified 23 May 2019 09:25
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