Most of the existing Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models focus on the conversion of sequential data and do not directly use syntactic information. We propose a novel end-to-end syntactic NMT model, extending a sequence-to-sequence model with the source-side phrase structure. Our model has an attention mechanism that enables the decoder to generate a translated word while softly aligning it with phrases as well as words of the source sentence. Experimental results on the WAT'15 English-to-Japanese dataset demonstrate that our proposed model considerably outperforms sequence-to-sequence attentional NMT models and compares favorably with the state-of-the-art tree-to-string SMT system.
@cite_28: An attentional mechanism has lately been used to improve neural machine translation (NMT) by selectively focusing on parts of the source sentence during translation. However, there has been little work exploring useful architectures for attention-based NMT. This paper examines two simple and effective classes of attentional mechanism: a global approach which always attends to all source words and a local one that only looks at a subset of source words at a time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of both approaches over the WMT translation tasks between English and German in both directions. With local attention, we achieve a significant gain of 5.0 BLEU points over non-attentional systems which already incorporate known techniques such as dropout. Our ensemble model using different attention architectures has established a new state-of-the-art result in the WMT'15 English to German translation task with 25.9 BLEU points, an improvement of 1.0 BLEU points over the existing best system backed by NMT and an n-gram reranker.
have shown that making the input sequences reversed is effective in a French-to-English translation task, and the technique has also proven effective in translation tasks between other European language pairs @cite_28 . All of the NMT models mentioned above are based on sequential encoders. To incorporate structural information into the NMT models, proposed to jointly learn structures inherent in source-side languages but did not report improvement of translation performance. These studies motivated us to investigate the role of syntactic structures explicitly given by existing syntactic parsers in the NMT models.