The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Recent Advances in Neural Machine Translation

The past year has witnessed rapid advances in sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) modeling for Machine Translation (MT). The classic RNN-based approaches to MT were first out-performed by the convolutional seq2seq model, which was then out-performed by the more recent Transformer model. Each of these new approaches consists of a fundamental architecture accompanied by a set of modeling and training techniques that are in principle applicable to other seq2seq architectures. In this paper, we tease apart the new architectures and their accompanying techniques in two ways. First, we identify several key modeling and training techniques, and apply them to the RNN architecture, yielding a new RNMT+ model that outperforms all of the three fundamental architectures on the benchmark WMT'14 English to French and English to German tasks. Second, we analyze the properties of each fundamental seq2seq architecture and devise new hybrid architectures intended to combine their strengths. Our hybrid models obtain further improvements, outperforming the RNMT+ model on both benchmark datasets.

PDF Abstract ACL 2018 PDF ACL 2018 Abstract

Datasets


Results from Other Papers


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Rank Source Paper Compare
Machine Translation WMT2014 English-French RNMT+ BLEU score 41.0 # 26
Hardware Burden 132G # 1
Operations per network pass 2.81G # 1
Machine Translation WMT2014 English-German RNMT+ BLEU score 28.5 # 42
Hardware Burden 44G # 1
Operations per network pass 2.81G # 1

Methods