Visualizing and Understanding Neural Machine Translation

Yanzhuo Ding, Yang Liu, Huanbo Luan, Maosong Sun

Abstract: While neural machine translation (NMT) has made remarkable progress in recent years, it is hard to interpret its internal workings due to the continuous representations and non-linearity of neural networks. In this work, we propose to use layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) to compute the contribution of each contextual word to arbitrary hidden states in the attention-based encoder-decoder framework. We show that visualization with LRP helps to interpret the internal workings of NMT and analyze translation errors.