Papers › Better Neural Machine Translation by Extracting Linguistic Information from BERT

Better Neural Machine Translation by Extracting Linguistic Information from BERT

7 Apr 2021EACL 2021 2arXiv:2104.02831archive 2025-07-28

Hassan S. Shavarani, Anoop Sarkar

Adding linguistic information (syntax or semantics) to neural machine translation (NMT) has mostly focused on using point estimates from pre-trained models. Directly using the capacity of massive pre-trained contextual word embedding models such as BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) has been marginally useful in NMT because effective fine-tuning is difficult to obtain for NMT without making training brittle and unreliable. We augment NMT by extracting dense fine-tuned vector-based linguistic information from BERT instead of using point estimates. Experimental results show that our method of incorporating linguistic information helps NMT to generalize better in a variety of training contexts and is no more difficult to train than conventional Transformer-based NMT.

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sfu-natlang/SFUTranslate officialmentioned in paperpytorchGPL-3.0 report

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Machine TranslationNMTTranslation

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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