Papers › Enhancing Machine Translation with Dependency-Aware Self-Attention

Enhancing Machine Translation with Dependency-Aware Self-Attention

6 Sep 2019ACL 2020 6arXiv:1909.03149archive 2025-07-28

Emanuele Bugliarello, Naoaki Okazaki

Most neural machine translation models only rely on pairs of parallel sentences, assuming syntactic information is automatically learned by an attention mechanism. In this work, we investigate different approaches to incorporate syntactic knowledge in the Transformer model and also propose a novel, parameter-free, dependency-aware self-attention mechanism that improves its translation quality, especially for long sentences and in low-resource scenarios. We show the efficacy of each approach on WMT English-German and English-Turkish, and WAT English-Japanese translation tasks.

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Machine TranslationTranslation

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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