Document-Level Neural Machine Translation Using BERT as Context Encoder

Large-scale pre-trained representations such as BERT have been widely used in many natural language understanding tasks. The methods of incorporating BERT into document-level machine translation are still being explored. BERT is able to understand sentence relationships since BERT is pre-trained using the next sentence prediction task. In our work, we leverage this property to improve document-level machine translation. In our proposed model, BERT performs as a context encoder to achieve document-level contextual information, which is then integrated into both the encoder and decoder. Experiment results show that our proposed method can significantly outperform strong document-level machine translation baselines on BLEU score. Moreover, the ablation study shows our method can capture document-level context information to boost translation performance.