Abstract
In the neural machine translation (NMT) paradigm, transformer-based NMT has achieved great progress in recent years. It is based on the standard end-to-end structure, and acquires translation knowledge through the attention mechanism from the parallel corpus automatically without human intervention. Inspired by the process of translating sentences by human translators and the successful application of translation template in statistical machine translation, this paper proposes a novel approach to incorporate the target translation template into the Transformer-based NMT model. Firstly, the template extraction method derives the parallel templates corpus from the constituency parse tree. Secondly, given a sentence to be translated, a fuzzy matching strategy is proposed to calculate the most possible target translation template from the parallel template corpus. Finally, an effective method is proposed to incorporate the target translate template into the Transformer-based NMT model. Experimental results on three translation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and it improves the translation quality significantly.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Sutskever, I., Vinyals, O., Le, Q.V.: Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 27 (2014)
Wu, Y., et al.: Google’s neural machine translation system: bridging the gap between human and machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.08144 (2016)
Gehring, J., Auli, M., Grangier, D., Yarats, D., Dauphin, Y.N.: Convolutional sequence to sequence learning. In: International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 1243–1252. PMLR (2017)
Bahdanau, D., Cho, K., Bengio, Y.: Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.0473 (2014)
Vaswani, A., et al.: Attention is all you need. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 30 (2017)
Nagao, M.: A framework of a mechanical translation between Japanese and english by analogy principle. Artif. Hum. Intell. 351–354 (1984)
Carl, M.: Inducing translation templates for example-based machine translation. In: Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit VII, pp. 250–258 (1999)
Duan, N., Tang, D., Chen, P., Zhou, M.: Question generation for question answering. In: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 866–874 (2017)
Wang, K., Quan, X., Wang, R.: Biset: bi-directional selective encoding with template for abstractive summarization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05012 (2019)
Wiseman, S., Shieber, S.M., Rush, A.M.: Learning neural templates for text generation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.10122 (2018)
Yang, J., Ma, S., Zhang, D., Li, Z., Zhou, M.: Improving neural machine translation with soft template prediction. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 5979–5989 (2020)
Shang, W., Feng, C., Zhang, T., Xu, D.: Guiding neural machine translation with retrieved translation template. In: 2021 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), pp. 1–7. IEEE (2021)
Kaji, H., Kida, Y., Morimoto, Y.: Learning translation templates from bilingual text. In: COLING 1992 Volume 2: The 14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (1992)
Liu, Y., Liu, Q., Lin, S.: Tree-to-string alignment template for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 609–616 (2006)
Zhang, M., Jiang, H., Aw, A., Li, H., Tan, C.L., Li, S.: A tree sequence alignment-based tree-to-tree translation model. In: Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT, pp. 559–567 (2008)
Quirk, C., Menezes, A., Cherry, C.: Dependency treelet translation: syntactically informed phrasal SMT. In: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’05), pp. 271–279 (2005)
Khan, M.A.S., Yamada, S., Nishino, T.: Example-based machine translation for low-resource language using chunk-string templates. In: Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIII: Papers (2011)
Zhang, J., Utiyama, M., Sumita, E., Neubig, G., Nakamura, S.: Guiding neural machine translation with retrieved translation pieces. arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.02559 (2018)
Dinu, G., Mathur, P., Federico, M., Al-Onaizan, Y.: Training neural machine translation to apply terminology constraints. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.01105 (2019)
Duan, S., Zhao, H., Zhang, D., Wang, R.: Syntax-aware data augmentation for neural machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.14200 (2020)
Manning, C.D., Surdeanu, M., Bauer, J., Finkel, J.R., Bethard, S., McClosky, D.: The stanfordcorenlp natural language processing toolkit. In: Proceedings of 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pp. 55–60 (2014)
He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., Sun, J.: Deep residual learning for image recognition. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 770–778 (2016)
Ba, J.L., Kiros, J.R., Hinton, G.E.: Layer normalization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.06450 (2016)
Ott, M., et al.: Fairseq: a fast, extensible toolkit for sequence modeling. arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.01038 (2019)
Koehn, P., et al.: Moses: open source toolkit for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics Companion Volume Proceedings of the Demo and Poster Sessions, pp. 177–180 (2007)
Sennrich, R., Haddow, B., Birch, A.: Neural machine translation of rare words with subword units. arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.07909 (2015)
Chen, M.X., et al.: The best of both worlds: combining recent advances in neural machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.09849 (2018)
Liu, L., Utiyama, M., Finch, A., Sumita, E.: Agreement on target-bidirectional neural machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 411–416 (2016)
Anastasopoulos, A., Chiang, D.: Tied multitask learning for neural speech translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.06655 (2018)
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province, China (Grant no. 2021-YKLH-12, 2022-YKLH-18), Scientific Research Foundation of Liaoning Province (Grant no. LJKQZ2021184), High-level talents research project of Yingkou Institute of Technology (Grant No. YJRC202026).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this paper
Cite this paper
Li, F., Chi, C., Yan, H., Zhang, Z. (2023). Improving Neural Machine Translation by Retrieving Target Translation Template. In: Huang, DS., Premaratne, P., Jin, B., Qu, B., Jo, KH., Hussain, A. (eds) Advanced Intelligent Computing Technology and Applications. ICIC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14089. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4752-2_54
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4752-2_54
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-99-4751-5
Online ISBN: 978-981-99-4752-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)