Wen Zhang

Wen Zhang, Liang Huang, Yang Feng et al.

Although neural machine translation has achieved promising results, it suffers from slow translation speed. The direct consequence is that a trade-off has to be made between translation quality and speed, thus its performance can not come into full play. We apply cube pruning, a popular technique to speed up dynamic programming, into neural machine translation to speed up the translation. To construct the equivalence class, similar target hidden states are combined, leading to less RNN expansion operations on the target side and less \$\mathrm{softmax}\$ operations over the large target vocabulary. The experiments show that, at the same or even better translation quality, our method can translate faster compared with naive beam search by \$3.3\times\$ on GPUs and \$3.5\times\$ on CPUs.

Wen Zhang, Jiawei Hu, Yang Feng et al.

Although neural machine translation with the encoder-decoder framework has achieved great success recently, it still suffers drawbacks of forgetting distant information, which is an inherent disadvantage of recurrent neural network structure, and disregarding relationship between source words during encoding step. Whereas in practice, the former information and relationship are often useful in current step. We target on solving these problems and thus introduce relation networks to learn better representations of the source. The relation networks are able to facilitate memorization capability of recurrent neural network via associating source words with each other, this would also help retain their relationships. Then the source representations and all the relations are fed into the attention component together while decoding, with the main encoder-decoder framework unchanged. Experiments on several datasets show that our method can improve the translation performance significantly over the conventional encoder-decoder model and even outperform the approach involving supervised syntactic knowledge.

Wen Zhang, Jiawei Hu, Yang Feng et al.

Although neural machine translation (NMT) with the encoder-decoder framework has achieved great success in recent times, it still suffers from some drawbacks: RNNs tend to forget old information which is often useful and the encoder only operates through words without considering word relationship. To solve these problems, we introduce a relation networks (RN) into NMT to refine the encoding representations of the source. In our method, the RN first augments the representation of each source word with its neighbors and reasons all the possible pairwise relations between them. Then the source representations and all the relations are fed to the attention module and the decoder together, keeping the main encoder-decoder architecture unchanged. Experiments on two Chinese-to-English data sets in different scales both show that our method can outperform the competitive baselines significantly.