Papers › Token Drop mechanism for Neural Machine Translation

Token Drop mechanism for Neural Machine Translation

21 Oct 2020COLING 2020 8arXiv:2010.11018archive 2025-07-28

Huaao Zhang, Shigui Qiu, Xiangyu Duan, Min Zhang

Neural machine translation with millions of parameters is vulnerable to unfamiliar inputs. We propose Token Drop to improve generalization and avoid overfitting for the NMT model. Similar to word dropout, whereas we replace dropped token with a special token instead of setting zero to words. We further introduce two self-supervised objectives: Replaced Token Detection and Dropped Token Prediction. Our method aims to force model generating target translation with less information, in this way the model can learn textual representation better. Experiments on Chinese-English and English-Romanian benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and our model achieves significant improvements over a strong Transformer baseline.

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zhajiahe/Token_Drop officialmentioned in paperpytorchMIT report

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Machine TranslationNMTTranslation

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