| Challenge: | Word alignment was once a core unsupervised learning task in natural language processing . but word alignment still plays an important role in interactive applications of neural machine translation, such as annotation transfer and lexicon injection. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Transformer model to train an unsupervised word alignment model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms GIZA++ on three data sets and is tightly integrated and does not affect translation quality. |
Similar Papers
Jointly Learning to Align and Translate with Transformer Models (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing word alignment models are not accurate for word alignments. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train a Transformer model to produce accurate translations and alignments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GIZA++ trained models on translation and alignment tasks while maintaining translation accuracy. |
A Discriminative Neural Model for Cross-Lingual Word Alignment (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | a novel word alignment model for machine translation has been developed for a number of languages . explicit word-to-word alignments have largely been lost in neural MT systems . |
| Approach: | They propose a discriminative word alignment model which integrates into a Transformer-based machine translation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on Chinese and Arabic alignments than standard models. |
A Bidirectional Transformer Based Alignment Model for Unsupervised Word Alignment (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning word alignment include statistical word aligners (e.g. GIZA++) Existing word alignment models employ a target-to-source attention mechanism which can provide rough word alignments but with a low accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidirectional Transformer based alignment model for unsupervised learning of the word alignment task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms both previous neural word alignment approaches and the popular statistical word aligner GIZA++ on three word alignment tasks. |
Assessing Non-autoregressive Alignment in Neural Machine Translation via Word Reordering (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive neural machine translation models that implicitly model dependencies are sub-optimal in handling word order errors. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a non-autoregressive language model that can be combined with Viterbi decoding to achieve better reordering performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art reordering mechanisms under different word permutation settings with a 2-27 BLEU improvement, suggesting high potential for word alignment in NAT. |
On the Word Alignment from Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Prior researches suggest that neural machine translation (NMT) captures word alignment through its attention mechanism, however, attention may fail to capture word alignment for some NMT models. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to induce word alignment which are general and agnostic to specific NMT models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods induce much better word alignment than attention. |
Accurate Word Alignment Induction from Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior work suggests that Transformer captures poor word alignments through its attention mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose two new word alignment induction methods that use attention weights to capture accurate word alignments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform baselines on three publicly available datasets and are significantly better than GIZA++. |
Inducing and Using Alignments for Transition-based AMR Parsing (2022.naacl-main)
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Andrew Drozdov, Jiawei Zhou, Radu Florian, Andrew McCallum, Tahira Naseem, Yoon Kim, Ramón Astudillo
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation parsers rely on node-to-word alignments, but lack the complexity of the pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural aligner for abstract meaning representation that learns node-to-word alignments without relying on pipelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves accuracy and generalization from AMR2.0 to AMR3.0 corpora. |
Rethinking Document-level Neural Machine Translation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models are weak enough for document-level translation . current models only translate sentences individually, resulting in poor document coherence . |
| Approach: | They propose to use the original Transformer model to test document-level neural machine translation . they find that the original transformer models can achieve strong results for document translation if trained properly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms sentence-level models on nine datasets and two sentence- level datasets across six languages. |
When do Contrastive Word Alignments Improve Many-to-many Neural Machine Translation? (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve pre-training for many-to-many neural machine translation use manual cleaning of bilingual dictionaries, which are unavailable for most language pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a word-level contrastive objective to leverage word alignments for many-to-many neural machine translation (NMT) Empirical results show that this leads to 0.8 BLEU gains for several language pairs. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed objective leads to 0.8 BLEU gains for several language pairs. |
Third-Party Aligner for Neural Word Alignments (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work shows that word alignment can be competitive . |
| Approach: | They propose to use word alignments generated by a third-party word aligner to supervise the neural word alignment training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can find more accurate word alignments and delete wrong alignments, leading to better performance than the current best third-party word aligner. |