Challenge: Existing approaches to train character-level models require very deep architectures that are difficult and slow to train.
Approach: They propose to fine tune a Transformer token-based model to get a model without token segmentation.
Outcome: The proposed model improves translation quality and robustness to noise while requiring less token segmentation.

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On the Importance of Word Boundaries in Character-level Neural Machine Translation (D19-56)

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Challenge: Neural Machine Translation models typically use a fixed-size lexical vocabulary . subword segmentation methods rely on statistical heuristics that lack any linguistic notion .
Approach: They propose a hierarchical decoding architecture for character-level NMT using subwords . they propose fewer parameters and a more efficient approach to perform translation at the level of words .
Outcome: The proposed model can reach higher translation accuracy than the subword-level model with fewer parameters while maintaining longer-distance contextual and grammatical dependencies.
Combining Subword Representations into Word-level Representations in the Transformer Architecture (2020.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Currently dominant approaches use word-level tokens, but this increases the length of the sequences and makes it difficult to profit from word-based information.
Approach: They propose to combine subword-level representations into word-level ones in the first layers of the encoder, reducing the effective length of the sequences in the following layers.
Outcome: The proposed model maintains translation quality with no extra word-level information . it is superior to the current dominant method for incorporating word- level source language information a priori .
Understanding Pure Character-Based Neural Machine Translation: The Case of Translating Finnish into English (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Recent work shows that deeper character-based neural machine translation models outperform subword-based models.
Approach: They propose to investigate the ability of character-based models to learn word senses and morphological inflections and the attention mechanism in Finnish into English translation.
Outcome: The character-based models outperform subword-based model in Finnish to English translation.
Revisiting Character-Based Neural Machine Translation with Capacity and Compression (D18-1)

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Challenge: Translating characters instead of words or word-fragments can simplify the processing pipeline but results in longer sequences .
Approach: They propose to use sequence-to-sequence architectures of sufficient depth to solve the problem . they also evaluate the performance versus computation time tradeoffs they offer .
Outcome: The proposed models outperform models operating over word fragments in character-level NMT, the authors show . they also show that the proposed models do not match the performance of their deep character baseline model .
When is Char Better Than Subword: A Systematic Study of Segmentation Algorithms for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-short)

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Challenge: Subword segmentation algorithms can produce sub-optimal segmentation when the target language is rich in morphological changes or there is not enough data for learning compact composition rules.
Approach: They compare character-based and subword-based neural machine translation systems . they find character-driven models are better at handling morphological phenomena .
Outcome: The character-based models are better at handling morphological phenomena, generating rare and unknown words, and more suitable for transferring to unseen domains.
Improving Neural Machine Translation by Incorporating Hierarchical Subword Features (C18-1)

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Challenge: Using subwords, we find that the appropriate subword units for the three layers differ depending on the model . incorporating hierarchical subword features improves BLEU scores on the IWSLT evaluation datasets.
Approach: They propose a method that expresses a word by combining "subwords" they propose to incorporate hierarchical subword features into a single embedding layer .
Outcome: The proposed method improves BLEU scores on the IWSLT evaluation datasets.
Shallow-to-Deep Training for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that deep training is 1:4 faster than training from scratch.
Approach: They propose a shallow-to-deep training method that learns deep models by stacking shallow models.
Outcome: The proposed method is 1:4 faster than training from scratch and achieves BLEU scores of 30:33 and 43:29 on two translation tasks.
From Characters to Words: Hierarchical Pre-trained Language Model for Open-vocabulary Language Understanding (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current models for natural language understanding require a preprocessing step to convert raw text into discrete tokens.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical open-vocabulary language model that adopts a shallow Transformer architecture to learn word representations from their characters and a deep inter-word Transformer module that contextualizes each word representation by attending to the entire word sequence.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on various downstream tasks and is robust to textual corruption and domain shift.
Low-resource neural machine translation with morphological modeling (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for character-based and sub-word tokenization are limited to the surface forms of the words.
Approach: They propose a framework-solution for modeling complex morphology in low-resource settings using a transformer architecture and beam search-based decoder.
Outcome: The proposed model improves translation performance on Kinyarwanda English translation using public-domain parallel text.
Applying the Transformer to Character-level Transduction (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: morphological inflection generation and historical text normalization tasks are character-level tasks that outperform recurrent models.
Approach: They propose a technique to handle feature-guided character-level transduction that further improves performance.
Outcome: The transformer outperforms recurrent models on morphological inflection and historical text normalization tasks.

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