| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) takes deterministic sequences for source representations. However, word-level or subword-level segmentation has multiple choices to split a source sequence with different word segmentors or different subword vocabulary sizes. |
| Approach: | They propose lattice-based encoders to explore effective word or subword representations in an automatic way during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed encoders can explore effective word or subword representation in an automatic way during training. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in sequence modeling have highlighted the strengths of the transformer architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a general lattice transformer for speech translation where the input is the output of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) they propose 'controllable' lattica attention mechanism to consume latent representations. |
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Our Neural Machine Translation Systems for WAT 2019 (D19-52)
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| Challenge: | In the last five years, statistical machine translation is gradually fading out in favor of neural machine translation. |
| Approach: | They describe a novel Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system for the WAT 2019 translation tasks they focus on. |
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Neural Machine Translation Incorporating Named Entity (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Conventional NMT models have difficulty translating words with multiple meanings because of the high ambiguity. |
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Attention Weights in Transformer NMT Fail Aligning Words Between Sequences but Largely Explain Model Predictions (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using attention weights, we show that NMT models make alignment errors by relying on uninformative tokens from the source sequence. |
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Factorized Transformer for Multi-Domain Neural Machine Translation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-domain Neural Machine Translation (MMT) is a challenging task due to the extreme diversity of cross-domain wording and phrasing style, and the imperfections of training data distribution. |
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Beyond Decoder-only: Large Language Models Can be Good Encoders for Machine Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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Yingfeng Luo, Tong Zheng, Yongyu Mu, Bei Li, Qinghong Zhang, Yongqi Gao, Ziqiang Xu, Peinan Feng, Xiaoqian Liu, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in machine translation have focused on a single pre-trained decoder . encoder-decoder architectures have received relatively little attention in NMT . |
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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. |
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Towards Reasonably-Sized Character-Level Transformer NMT by Finetuning Subword Systems (2020.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
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 . |
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Exploiting Deep Representations for Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models typically implement encoder and decoder as multiple layers, but only the top layers are leveraged in the subsequent process, which misses the opportunity to exploit useful information embedded in other layers. |
| Approach: | They propose to expose all of these signals with layer aggregation and multi-layer attention mechanisms and introduce an auxiliary regularization term to encourage different layers to capture diverse information. |
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