论文标题
魔鬼在细节上:关于神经机器翻译中词汇选择的陷阱
The Devil is in the Details: On the Pitfalls of Vocabulary Selection in Neural Machine Translation
论文作者
论文摘要
词汇选择或词汇入围,是一种众所周知的技术,可以通过限制推理期间允许的输出单词的集合来改善神经机器翻译模型的延迟。所选集通常由单独训练的对齐模型参数确定,而与推理时间的源句子上下文无关。尽管词汇选择在先前工作中的自动质量指标方面似乎具有竞争力,但我们表明,它可能无法选择正确的输出单词集,尤其是对于语义上的非构成语言现象,例如惯用的表达式,从而导致人类所感知的降低翻译质量。在实际情况下,通过增加允许集的大小来交易质量的质量通常不是一个选择。我们提出了一个集成到神经翻译模型中的词汇选择模型,该模型可预测上下文化编码器表示的允许输出单词的集合。通过对WMT NEWSTEST2020和惯用表达式的人类评估来衡量的不受约束系统的翻译质量,在推理潜伏期竞争中,使用积极的阈值竞争基于对齐的选择,从而消除了对单独训练的对齐模型的依赖性。
Vocabulary selection, or lexical shortlisting, is a well-known technique to improve latency of Neural Machine Translation models by constraining the set of allowed output words during inference. The chosen set is typically determined by separately trained alignment model parameters, independent of the source-sentence context at inference time. While vocabulary selection appears competitive with respect to automatic quality metrics in prior work, we show that it can fail to select the right set of output words, particularly for semantically non-compositional linguistic phenomena such as idiomatic expressions, leading to reduced translation quality as perceived by humans. Trading off latency for quality by increasing the size of the allowed set is often not an option in real-world scenarios. We propose a model of vocabulary selection, integrated into the neural translation model, that predicts the set of allowed output words from contextualized encoder representations. This restores translation quality of an unconstrained system, as measured by human evaluations on WMT newstest2020 and idiomatic expressions, at an inference latency competitive with alignment-based selection using aggressive thresholds, thereby removing the dependency on separately trained alignment models.