{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/towards-character-level-transformer-nmt-by","title":"Towards Reasonably-Sized Character-Level Transformer NMT by Finetuning Subword Systems","arxiv_id":"2004.14280","date":"2020-04-29","proceeding":"EMNLP 2020 11","authors":["Jindřich Libovický","Alexander Fraser"],"abstract":"Applying the Transformer architecture on the character level usually requires very deep architectures that are difficult and slow to train. These problems can be partially overcome by incorporating a segmentation into tokens in the model. We show that by initially training a subword model and then finetuning it on characters, we can obtain a neural machine translation model that works at the character level without requiring token segmentation. We use only the vanilla 6-layer Transformer Base architecture. Our character-level models better capture morphological phenomena and show more robustness to noise at the expense of somewhat worse overall translation quality. Our study is a significant step towards high-performance and easy to train character-based models that are not extremely large.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14280v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.14280v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"towards-character-level-transformer-nmt-by","repo_url":"https://github.com/jlibovicky/char-nmt","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"towards-character-level-transformer-nmt-by","repo_url":"https://github.com/danielinux7/Multilingual-Parallel-Corpus","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"nmt","task_name":"NMT"},{"task_slug":"segmentation","task_name":"Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}