Papers › Exploiting Semantics in Neural Machine Translation with Graph Convolutional Networks

Exploiting Semantics in Neural Machine Translation with Graph Convolutional Networks

23 Apr 2018NAACL 2018 6arXiv:1804.08313archive 2025-07-28

Diego Marcheggiani, Jasmijn Bastings, Ivan Titov

Semantic representations have long been argued as potentially useful for enforcing meaning preservation and improving generalization performance of machine translation methods. In this work, we are the first to incorporate information about predicate-argument structure of source sentences (namely, semantic-role representations) into neural machine translation. We use Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to inject a semantic bias into sentence encoders and achieve improvements in BLEU scores over the linguistic-agnostic and syntax-aware versions on the English--German language pair.

PaperPDFConference PDF

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Machine TranslationSentenceTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Machine Translation WMT2016 English-German BiRNN + GCN (Syn + Sem) BLEU score 24.9 #8 of 12 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Graph Convolutional Networks

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections