English

Towards String-to-Tree Neural Machine Translation

Computation and Language 2017-05-09 v3

Abstract

We present a simple method to incorporate syntactic information about the target language in a neural machine translation system by translating into linearized, lexicalized constituency trees. An experiment on the WMT16 German-English news translation task resulted in an improved BLEU score when compared to a syntax-agnostic NMT baseline trained on the same dataset. An analysis of the translations from the syntax-aware system shows that it performs more reordering during translation in comparison to the baseline. A small-scale human evaluation also showed an advantage to the syntax-aware system.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.04743,
  title  = {Towards String-to-Tree Neural Machine Translation},
  author = {Roee Aharoni and Yoav Goldberg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.04743},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Accepted as a short paper in ACL 2017

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:18:25.421Z