Matthieu Felix


2018

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XNMT: The eXtensible Neural Machine Translation Toolkit
Graham Neubig | Matthias Sperber | Xinyi Wang | Matthieu Felix | Austin Matthews | Sarguna Padmanabhan | Ye Qi | Devendra Sachan | Philip Arthur | Pierre Godard | John Hewitt | Rachid Riad | Liming Wang
Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 1: Research Track)

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When and Why Are Pre-Trained Word Embeddings Useful for Neural Machine Translation?
Ye Qi | Devendra Sachan | Matthieu Felix | Sarguna Padmanabhan | Graham Neubig
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)

The performance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems often suffers in low-resource scenarios where sufficiently large-scale parallel corpora cannot be obtained. Pre-trained word embeddings have proven to be invaluable for improving performance in natural language analysis tasks, which often suffer from paucity of data. However, their utility for NMT has not been extensively explored. In this work, we perform five sets of experiments that analyze when we can expect pre-trained word embeddings to help in NMT tasks. We show that such embeddings can be surprisingly effective in some cases – providing gains of up to 20 BLEU points in the most favorable setting.