Recurrent Graph Syntax Encoder for Neural Machine Translation

Syntax-incorporated machine translation models have been proven successful in improving the model's reasoning and meaning preservation ability. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective graph-structured encoder, the Recurrent Graph Syntax Encoder, dubbed \textbf{RGSE}, which enhances the ability to capture useful syntactic information. The RGSE is done over a standard encoder (recurrent or self-attention encoder), regarding recurrent network units as graph nodes and injects syntactic dependencies as edges, such that RGSE models syntactic dependencies and sequential information (\textit{i.e.}, word order) simultaneously. Our approach achieves considerable improvements over several syntax-aware NMT models in English$\Rightarrow$German and English$\Rightarrow$Czech translation tasks. And RGSE-equipped big model obtains competitive result compared with the state-of-the-art model in WMT14 En-De task. Extensive analysis further verifies that RGSE could benefit long sentence modeling, and produces better translations.