The state of the art in machine translation (MT) is governed by neural approaches, which typically provide superior translation accuracy over statistical approaches. However, on the closely related task of word alignment, traditional statistical word alignment models often remain the go-to solution. In this paper, we present an approach to train a Transformer model to produce both accurate translations and alignments. We extract discrete alignments from the attention probabilities learnt during regular neural machine translation model training and leverage them in a multi-task framework to optimize towards translation and alignment objectives. We demonstrate that our approach produces competitive results compared to GIZA++ trained IBM alignment models without sacrificing translation accuracy and outperforms previous attempts on Transformer model based word alignment. Finally, by incorporating IBM model alignments into our multi-task training, we report significantly better alignment accuracies compared to GIZA++ on three publicly available data sets. Our implementation has been open-sourced 1 .
This paper describes one of the collaborative efforts within EU-BRIDGE to further advance the state of the art in machine translation between two European language pairs, German→English and English→German. Three research institutes involved in the EU-BRIDGE project combined their individual machine translation systems and participated with a joint setup in the shared translation task of the evaluation campaign at the ACL 2014 Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT 2014).We combined up to nine different machine translation engines via system combination. RWTH Aachen University, the University of Edinburgh, and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology developed several individual systems which serve as system combination input. We devoted special attention to building syntax-based systems and combining them with the phrasebased ones. The joint setups yield empirical gains of up to 1.6 points in BLEU and 1.0 points in TER on the WMT newstest2013 test set compared to the best single systems.
This paper describes the statistical machine translation (SMT) systems developed at RWTH Aachen University for the German→English translation task of the ACL 2014 Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT 2014). Both hierarchical and phrase-based SMT systems are applied employing hierarchical phrase reordering and word class language models. For the phrase-based system, we run discriminative phrase training. In addition, we describe our preprocessing pipeline for German→English.
Jane is RWTH's hierarchical phrase-based translation toolkit. It includes tools for phrase extraction, translation and scaling factor optimization, with efficient and documented programs of which large parts can be parallelized. The decoder features syntactic enhancements, reorderings, triplet models, discriminative word lexica, and support for a variety of language model formats. In this article, we will review the main features of Jane and explain the overall architecture. We will also indicate where and how new models can be included.
This work presents a flexible and efficient discriminative training approach for statistical machine translation. We propose to use the RPROP algorithm for optimizing a maximum expected BLEU objective and experimentally compare it to several other updating schemes. It proves to be more efficient and effective than the previously proposed growth transformation technique and also yields better results than stochastic gradient descent and AdaGrad. We also report strong empirical results on two large scale tasks, namely BOLT Chinese→English and WMT German→English, where our final systems outperform results reported by Setiawan and Zhou (2013) and on matrix.statmt.org. On the WMT task, discriminative training is performed on the full training data of 4M sentence pairs, which is unsurpassed in the literature.
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