English

Using Whole Document Context in Neural Machine Translation

Computation and Language 2019-10-17 v1

Abstract

In Machine Translation, considering the document as a whole can help to resolve ambiguities and inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose a simple yet promising approach to add contextual information in Neural Machine Translation. We present a method to add source context that capture the whole document with accurate boundaries, taking every word into account. We provide this additional information to a Transformer model and study the impact of our method on three language pairs. The proposed approach obtains promising results in the English-German, English-French and French-English document-level translation tasks. We observe interesting cross-sentential behaviors where the model learns to use document-level information to improve translation coherence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.07481,
  title  = {Using Whole Document Context in Neural Machine Translation},
  author = {Valentin Macé and Christophe Servan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.07481},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted paper to IWSLT2019

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:45:42.245Z