English

An Efficient Character-Level Neural Machine Translation

Computation and Language 2016-08-22 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Neural machine translation aims at building a single large neural network that can be trained to maximize translation performance. The encoder-decoder architecture with an attention mechanism achieves a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based systems on the task of English-to-French translation. However, the use of large vocabulary becomes the bottleneck in both training and improving the performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient architecture to train a deep character-level neural machine translation by introducing a decimator and an interpolator. The decimator is used to sample the source sequence before encoding while the interpolator is used to resample after decoding. Such a deep model has two major advantages. It avoids the large vocabulary issue radically; at the same time, it is much faster and more memory-efficient in training than conventional character-based models. More interestingly, our model is able to translate the misspelled word like human beings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1608.04738,
  title  = {An Efficient Character-Level Neural Machine Translation},
  author = {Shenjian Zhao and Zhihua Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.04738},
  year   = {2016}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:21:26.129Z