Papers › Incorporating a Local Translation Mechanism into Non-autoregressive Translation

Incorporating a Local Translation Mechanism into Non-autoregressive Translation

12 Nov 2020EMNLP 2020 11arXiv:2011.06132archive 2025-07-28

Xiang Kong, Zhisong Zhang, Eduard Hovy

In this work, we introduce a novel local autoregressive translation (LAT) mechanism into non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models so as to capture local dependencies among tar-get outputs. Specifically, for each target decoding position, instead of only one token, we predict a short sequence of tokens in an autoregressive way. We further design an efficient merging algorithm to align and merge the out-put pieces into one final output sequence. We integrate LAT into the conditional masked language model (CMLM; Ghazvininejad et al.,2019) and similarly adopt iterative decoding. Empirical results on five translation tasks show that compared with CMLM, our method achieves comparable or better performance with fewer decoding iterations, bringing a 2.5xspeedup. Further analysis indicates that our method reduces repeated translations and performs better at longer sentences.

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MSeg shawnkx/NAT-with-Local-AT/Mask-Predict/nat_merge.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · c6109769dc8bd5e7 · report
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Tasks

Language ModelingMachine TranslationTARTranslation

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Machine Translation WMT2014 English-German CMLM+LAT+4 iterations BLEU score 27.35 #50 of 91 Archive leaderboard report
Machine Translation WMT2014 English-German CMLM+LAT+1 iterations BLEU score 25.20 #69 of 91 Archive leaderboard report
Machine Translation WMT2014 German-English CMLM+LAT+4 iterations BLEU score 32.04 #5 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Machine Translation WMT2014 German-English CMLM+LAT+1 iterations BLEU score 29.91 #8 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Machine Translation WMT2016 English-Romanian CMLM+LAT+4 iterations BLEU score 32.87 #2 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Machine Translation WMT2016 English-Romanian CMLM+LAT+1 iterations BLEU score 30.74 #6 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Machine Translation WMT2016 Romanian-English CMLM+LAT+4 iterations BLEU score 33.26 #8 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Machine Translation WMT2016 Romanian-English CMLM+LAT+1 iterations BLEU score 31.24 #17 of 21 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.

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