Search Engine Guided Non-Parametric Neural Machine Translation

Search Engine Guided Non-Parametric Neural Machine Translation
Prof. Victor Li
October 5, 2022
Research

In this paper, we extend an attention-based neural machine translation (NMT) model by allowing it to access an entire training set of parallel sentence pairs even after training. The proposed approach consists of two stages. In the first stage--retrieval stage--, an off-the-shelf, black-box search engine is used to retrieve a small subset of sentence pairs from a training set given a source sentence. These pairs are further filtered based on a fuzzy matching score based on edit distance. In the second stage--translation stage--, a novel translation model, called translation memory enhanced NMT (TM-NMT), seamlessly uses both the source sentence and a set of retrieved sentence pairs to perform the translation. Empirical evaluation on three language pairs (En-Fr, En-De, and En-Es) shows that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the baseline approach and the improvement is more significant when more relevant sentence pairs were retrieved.

Search Engine Guided Non-Parametric Neural Machine Translation

S.B. (1977), S.M. (1979), E.E. (1980), Sc.D. (1981), EECS, MIT. Chair Professor in Information Engineering, HKU. Fellow of IEEE, HKIE, IAE, and HK Academy of Engineering Sciences. Awardee of the Bronze Bauhinia Star, Government of HKSAR.