Selective Attention for Context-aware Neural Machine Translation

Sameen Maruf, André F. T. Martins, Gholamreza Haffari


Abstract
Despite the progress made in sentence-level NMT, current systems still fall short at achieving fluent, good quality translation for a full document. Recent works in context-aware NMT consider only a few previous sentences as context and may not scale to entire documents. To this end, we propose a novel and scalable top-down approach to hierarchical attention for context-aware NMT which uses sparse attention to selectively focus on relevant sentences in the document context and then attends to key words in those sentences. We also propose single-level attention approaches based on sentence or word-level information in the context. The document-level context representation, produced from these attention modules, is integrated into the encoder or decoder of the Transformer model depending on whether we use monolingual or bilingual context. Our experiments and evaluation on English-German datasets in different document MT settings show that our selective attention approach not only significantly outperforms context-agnostic baselines but also surpasses context-aware baselines in most cases.
Anthology ID:
N19-1313
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3092–3102
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1313
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1313
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sameen Maruf, André F. T. Martins, and Gholamreza Haffari. 2019. Selective Attention for Context-aware Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 3092–3102, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Selective Attention for Context-aware Neural Machine Translation (Maruf et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1313.pdf
Presentation:
 N19-1313.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/361725345
Code
 sameenmaruf/selective-attn