English

Pretrained Language Models for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation

Computation and Language 2019-11-11 v1

Abstract

Previous work on document-level NMT usually focuses on limited contexts because of degraded performance on larger contexts. In this paper, we investigate on using large contexts with three main contributions: (1) Different from previous work which pertrained models on large-scale sentence-level parallel corpora, we use pretrained language models, specifically BERT, which are trained on monolingual documents; (2) We propose context manipulation methods to control the influence of large contexts, which lead to comparable results on systems using small and large contexts; (3) We introduce a multi-task training for regularization to avoid models overfitting our training corpora, which further improves our systems together with a deeper encoder. Experiments are conducted on the widely used IWSLT data sets with three language pairs, i.e., Chinese--English, French--English and Spanish--English. Results show that our systems are significantly better than three previously reported document-level systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.03110,
  title  = {Pretrained Language Models for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation},
  author = {Liangyou Li and Xin Jiang and Qun Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.03110},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:08:58.578Z