Skip to main content

A Hybrid Neural Machine Translation Technique for Translating Low Resource Languages

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition (MLDM 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10935))

Abstract

Neural machine translation (NMT) has produced very promising results on various high resource languages that have sizeable parallel datasets. However, low resource languages that lack sufficient parallel datasets face challenges in the automated translation filed. The main part of NMT is a recurrent neural network, which can work with sequential data at word and sentence levels, given that sequences are not too long. Due to the large number of word and sequence combinations, a parallel dataset is required, which unfortunately is not always available, particularly for low resource languages. Therefore, we adapted a character neural translation model that was based on a combined structure of recurrent neural network and convolutional neural network. This model was trained on the IWSLT 2016 Arabic—English and the IWSLT 2015 English—Vietnamese datasets. The model produced encouraging results particularly on the Arabic datasets, where Arabic is considered a rich morphological language.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Cho, K., Van Merriënboer, B., Gulcehre, C., Bahdanau, D., Bougares, F., Schwenk, H., Bengio, Y.: Learning phrase representations using rnn encoder-decoder for statistical machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.1078 (2014)

  2. Lamb, A., Xie, M.: Convolutional encoders for neural machine translation. WEB download (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Sutskever, I., Vinyals, O., Le, Q.V.: Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 3104–3112 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Gulcehre, C., Firat, O., Xu, K., Cho, K., Barrault, L., Lin, H.C., Bougares, F., Schwenk, H., Bengio, Y.: On using monolingual corpora in neural machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.03535 (2015)

  5. Ramachandran, P., Liu, P.J., Le, Q.V.: Unsupervised pretraining for sequence to sequence learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.02683 (2016)

  6. Bradbury, J., Merity, S., Xiong, C., Socher, R.: Quasi-recurrent neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.01576 (2016)

  7. Wang, X., Liu, Y., Sun, C., Wang, B., Wang, X.: Predicting polarities of tweets by composing word embeddings with long short-term memory. In: ACL, no. 1, pp. 1343–1353 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Zaremba, W., Sutskever, I., Vinyals, O.: Recurrent neural network regularization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.2329 (2014)

  9. Zhang, X., Zhao, J., LeCun, Y.: Character-level convolutional networks for text classification. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 649–657 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Chen, Y., Liu, Y., Cheng, Y., Li, V.O.: A teacher-student framework for zero-resource neural machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.00753 (2017)

  11. He, D., Xia, Y., Qin, T., Wang, L., Yu, N., Liu, T., Ma, W.Y.: Dual learning for machine translation. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 820–828 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Wu, J., Hou, H., Shen, Z., Du, J., Li, J.: Adapting attention-based neural network to low-resource Mongolian-Chinese machine translation. In: Lin, C.-Y., Xue, N., Zhao, D., Huang, X., Feng, Y. (eds.) ICCPOL/NLPCC -2016. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 10102, pp. 470–480. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50496-4_39

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Belinkov, Y., Glass, J.: Large-scale machine translation between arabic and hebrewcorpora and initial results. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.07701 (2016)

  14. Almahairi, A., Cho, K., Habash, N., Courville, A.: First result on arabic neural machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.02680 (2016)

  15. Firat, O., Cho, K., Bengio, Y.: Multi-way, multilingual neural machine translation with a shared attention mechanism. arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.01073 (2016)

  16. Kim, Y.: Convolutional neural networks for sentence classification. arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.5882 (2014)

  17. Gehring, J., Auli, M., Grangier, D., Yarats, D., Dauphin, Y.N.: Convolutional sequence to sequence learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.03122 (2017)

  18. Cettolo, M., Girardi, C., Federico, M.: WIT3: web inventory of transcribed and translated talks. In: Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT), pp. 261–268 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Hong, V.T., Thuong, H.V., Le Tien, T., Pham, L.N., Van, V.N.: The English-Vietnamese Machine Translation System for IWSLT 2015 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Tiedemann, J.: Parallel data, tools and interfaces in OPUS. In: LREC, vol. 2012, pp. 2214–2218 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Kingma, D., Ba, J.: Adam: A method for stochastic optimization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6980 (2014)

  22. Papineni, K., Roukos, S., Ward, T., Zhu, W.J.: BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 311–318 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Neubig: Tips on building neural machine translation systems (2016). https://www.kantanmt.com/whatisbleuscore.php

  24. Klein, G., Kim, Y., Deng, Y., Senellart, J., Rush, A.M.: Opennmt: open-source toolkit for neural machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.02810 (2017)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ebtesam H. Almansor .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Almansor, E.H., Al-Ani, A. (2018). A Hybrid Neural Machine Translation Technique for Translating Low Resource Languages. In: Perner, P. (eds) Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition. MLDM 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10935. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96133-0_26

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96133-0_26

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96132-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96133-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics