Towards Neural Phrase-based Machine Translation

Po-Sen Huang, Chong Wang, Sitao Huang, Dengyong Zhou, Li Deng

Abstract: In this paper, we present Neural Phrase-based Machine Translation (NPMT). Our method explicitly models the phrase structures in output sequences using Sleep-WAke Networks (SWAN), a recently proposed segmentation-based sequence modeling method. To mitigate the monotonic alignment requirement of SWAN, we introduce a new layer to perform (soft) local reordering of input sequences. Different from existing neural machine translation (NMT) approaches, NPMT does not use attention-based decoding mechanisms. Instead, it directly outputs phrases in a sequential order and can decode in linear time. Our experiments show that NPMT achieves superior performances on IWSLT 2014 German-English/English-German and IWSLT 2015 English-Vietnamese machine translation tasks compared with strong NMT baselines. We also observe that our method produces meaningful phrases in output languages.

TL;DR: Neural phrase-based machine translation with linear decoding time

Keywords: Neural Machine Translation, Sequence to Sequence, Sequence Modeling

Code: [ posenhuang/NPMT](https://github.com/posenhuang/NPMT) + [ 3 community implementations](https://paperswithcode.com/paper/?openreview=HktJec1RZ)

Community Implementations: [ 5 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:1706.05565/code)