Related papers: Understanding and Addressing the Under-Translation…

In this paper, we evaluate the translation of negation both automatically and manually, in English--German (EN--DE) and English--Chinese (EN--ZH). We show that the ability of neural machine translation (NMT) models to translate negation has…

Translating in real-time, a.k.a. simultaneous translation, outputs translation words before the input sentence ends, which is a challenging problem for conventional machine translation methods. We propose a neural machine translation (NMT)…

Neural machine translation (NMT) has recently become popular in the field of machine translation. However, NMT suffers from the problem of repeating or missing words in the translation. To address this problem, Tu et al. (2017) proposed an…

While achieving state-of-the-art results in multiple tasks and languages, translation-based cross-lingual transfer is often overlooked in favour of massively multilingual pre-trained encoders. Arguably, this is due to its main limitations:…

We investigate why neural machine translation (NMT) systems assign high probability to empty translations. We find two explanations. First, label smoothing makes correct-length translations less confident, making it easier for the empty…

Neural machine translation (NMT) is often criticized for failures that happen without awareness. The lack of competency awareness makes NMT untrustworthy. This is in sharp contrast to human translators who give feedback or conduct further…

Training data for NLP tasks often exhibits gender bias in that fewer sentences refer to women than to men. In Neural Machine Translation (NMT) gender bias has been shown to reduce translation quality, particularly when the target language…

Transformers (Vaswani et al., 2017) have brought a remarkable improvement in the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) systems but they could be surprisingly vulnerable to noise. In this work, we try to investigate how noise…

In Neural Machine Translation (NMT), each token prediction is conditioned on the source sentence and the target prefix (what has been previously translated at a decoding step). However, previous work on interpretability in NMT has mainly…

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (NMT) enables one model to serve all translation directions, including ones that are unseen during training, i.e. zero-shot translation. Despite being theoretically attractive, current models often…

In NMT we search for the mode of the model distribution to form predictions. The mode and other high-probability translations found by beam search have been shown to often be inadequate in a number of ways. This prevents improving…

We propose a novel model for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Different from the conventional method, our model can predict the future text length and words at each decoding time step so that the generation can be helped with the…

Massively multilingual models for neural machine translation (NMT) are theoretically attractive, but often underperform bilingual models and deliver poor zero-shot translations. In this paper, we explore ways to improve them. We argue that…

Confidence estimation aims to quantify the confidence of the model prediction, providing an expectation of success. A well-calibrated confidence estimate enables accurate failure prediction and proper risk measurement when given noisy…

Zero-shot translation is a promising direction for building a comprehensive multilingual neural machine translation~(MNMT) system. However, its quality is still not satisfactory due to off-target issues. In this paper, we aim to understand…

Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved notable success in recent times, however it is also widely recognized that this approach has limitations with handling infrequent words and word pairs. This paper presents a novel…

While back-translation is simple and effective in exploiting abundant monolingual corpora to improve low-resource neural machine translation (NMT), the synthetic bilingual corpora generated by NMT models trained on limited authentic…

Neural machine translation (NMT) often makes mistakes in translating low-frequency content words that are essential to understanding the meaning of the sentence. We propose a method to alleviate this problem by augmenting NMT systems with…

In neural machine translation (NMT), the computational cost at the output layer increases with the size of the target-side vocabulary. Using a limited-size vocabulary instead may cause a significant decrease in translation quality. This…

Previous studies have shown that initializing neural machine translation (NMT) models with the pre-trained language models (LM) can speed up the model training and boost the model performance. In this work, we identify a critical…