Pronouns are frequently omitted in pro-drop languages, such as Chinese, generally leading to significant challenges with respect to the production of complete translations. To date, very little attention has been paid to the dropped pronoun (DP) problem within neural machine translation (NMT). In this work, we propose a novel reconstruction-based approach to alleviating DP translation problems for NMT models. Firstly, DPs within all source sentences are automatically annotated with parallel information extracted from the bilingual training corpus. Next, the annotated source sentence is reconstructed from hidden representations in the NMT model. With auxiliary training objectives, in terms of reconstruction scores, the parameters associated with the NMT model are guided to produce enhanced hidden representations that are encouraged as much as possible to embed annotated DP information. Experimental results on both Chinese-English and Japanese-English dialogue translation tasks show that the proposed approach significantly and consistently improves translation performance over a strong NMT baseline, which is directly built on the training data annotated with DPs.
@cite_15: We explore an original strategy for building deep networks, based on stacking layers of denoising autoencoders which are trained locally to denoise corrupted versions of their inputs. The resulting algorithm is a straightforward variation on the stacking of ordinary autoencoders. It is however shown on a benchmark of classification problems to yield significantly lower classification error, thus bridging the performance gap with deep belief networks (DBN), and in several cases surpassing it. Higher level representations learnt in this purely unsupervised fashion also help boost the performance of subsequent SVM classifiers. Qualitative experiments show that, contrary to ordinary autoencoders, denoising autoencoders are able to learn Gabor-like edge detectors from natural image patches and larger stroke detectors from digit images. This work clearly establishes the value of using a denoising criterion as a tractable unsupervised objective to guide the learning of useful higher level representations.
@cite_17: The multilayer perceptron, when working in auto-association mode, is sometimes considered as an interesting candidate to perform data compression or dimensionality reduction of the feature space in information processing applications. The present paper shows that, for auto-association, the nonlinearities of the hidden units are useless and that the optimal parameter values can be derived directly by purely linear techniques relying on singular value decomposition and low rank matrix approximation, similar in spirit to the well-known Karhunen-Loeve transform. This approach appears thus as an efficient alternative to the general error back-propagation algorithm commonly used for training multilayer perceptrons. Moreover, it also gives a clear interpretation of the role of the different parameters.
Reconstruction is a standard concept in auto-encoder, that guides towards learning representations that captures the underlying explanatory factors for the observed input @cite_17 @cite_15 . An auto-encoder model consists of an encoding function to compute a representation from an input, and a decoding function to reconstruct the input from the representation. The parameters involved in the two functions are trained to maximize the reconstruction score , which measures the similarity between the original input and reconstructed input. Inspired by the concept of reconstruction , tu2017neural proposed guiding decoder hidden states to embed complete source information by reconstructing the hidden states back to the original source sentence. Our approach differs at: (1) we introduced not only decoder-side reconstructor but also encoder-side reconstructor to learn enhanced hidden states of both encoder and decoder; and (2) we guide the hidden states to embed complete source information as well as the labelled DP information.