arXiv subjects

Fethi Bougares

Publications and source records attributed to Fethi Bougares.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

NMTPY: A Flexible Toolkit for Advanced Neural Machine Translation Systems

In this paper, we present nmtpy, a flexible Python toolkit based on Theano for training Neural Machine Translation and other neural sequence-to-sequence architectures. nmtpy decouples the specification of a network from the training and inference utilities to simplify the addition of a new architecture and reduce the amount of boilerplate code to be written. nmtpy has been used for LIUM's top-ranked submissions to WMT Multimodal Machine Translation and News Translation tasks in 2016 and 2017.

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arXiv2016

Factored Neural Machine Translation

We present a new approach for neural machine translation (NMT) using the morphological and grammatical decomposition of the words (factors) in the output side of the neural network. This architecture addresses two main problems occurring in MT, namely dealing with a large target language vocabulary and the out of vocabulary (OOV) words. By the means of factors, we are able to handle larger vocabulary and reduce the training time (for systems with equivalent target language vocabulary size). In addition, we can produce new words that are not in the vocabulary. We use a morphological analyser to get a factored representation of each word (lemmas, Part of Speech tag, tense, person, gender and number). We have extended the NMT approach with attention mechanism in order to have two different outputs, one for the lemmas and the other for the rest of the factors. The final translation is built using some \textit{a priori} linguistic information. We compare our extension with a word-based NMT system. The experiments, performed on the IWSLT'15 dataset translating from English to French, show that while the performance do not always increase, the system can manage a much larger vocabulary and consistently reduce the OOV rate. We observe up to 2% BLEU point improvement in a simulated out of domain translation setup.

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arXiv2016

Multimodal Attention for Neural Machine Translation

The attention mechanism is an important part of the neural machine translation (NMT) where it was reported to produce richer source representation compared to fixed-length encoding sequence-to-sequence models. Recently, the effectiveness of attention has also been explored in the context of image captioning. In this work, we assess the feasibility of a multimodal attention mechanism that simultaneously focus over an image and its natural language description for generating a description in another language. We train several variants of our proposed attention mechanism on the Multi30k multilingual image captioning dataset. We show that a dedicated attention for each modality achieves up to 1.6 points in BLEU and METEOR compared to a textual NMT baseline.

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arXiv2016

Does Multimodality Help Human and Machine for Translation and Image Captioning?

This paper presents the systems developed by LIUM and CVC for the WMT16 Multimodal Machine Translation challenge. We explored various comparative methods, namely phrase-based systems and attentional recurrent neural networks models trained using monomodal or multimodal data. We also performed a human evaluation in order to estimate the usefulness of multimodal data for human machine translation and image description generation. Our systems obtained the best results for both tasks according to the automatic evaluation metrics BLEU and METEOR.

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arXiv2015

Incremental Adaptation Strategies for Neural Network Language Models

It is today acknowledged that neural network language models outperform backoff language models in applications like speech recognition or statistical machine translation. However, training these models on large amounts of data can take several days. We present efficient techniques to adapt a neural network language model to new data. Instead of training a completely new model or relying on mixture approaches, we propose two new methods: continued training on resampled data or insertion of adaptation layers. We present experimental results in an CAT environment where the post-edits of professional translators are used to improve an SMT system. Both methods are very fast and achieve significant improvements without overfitting the small adaptation data.

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arXiv2015

On Using Monolingual Corpora in Neural Machine Translation

Recent work on end-to-end neural network-based architectures for machine translation has shown promising results for En-Fr and En-De translation. Arguably, one of the major factors behind this success has been the availability of high quality parallel corpora. In this work, we investigate how to leverage abundant monolingual corpora for neural machine translation. Compared to a phrase-based and hierarchical baseline, we obtain up to $1.96$ BLEU improvement on the low-resource language pair Turkish-English, and $1.59$ BLEU on the focused domain task of Chinese-English chat messages. While our method was initially targeted toward such tasks with less parallel data, we show that it also extends to high resource languages such as Cs-En and De-En where we obtain an improvement of $0.39$ and $0.47$ BLEU scores over the neural machine translation baselines, respectively.

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arXiv2014

Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation

In this paper, we propose a novel neural network model called RNN Encoder-Decoder that consists of two recurrent neural networks (RNN). One RNN encodes a sequence of symbols into a fixed-length vector representation, and the other decodes the representation into another sequence of symbols. The encoder and decoder of the proposed model are jointly trained to maximize the conditional probability of a target sequence given a source sequence. The performance of a statistical machine translation system is empirically found to improve by using the conditional probabilities of phrase pairs computed by the RNN Encoder-Decoder as an additional feature in the existing log-linear model. Qualitatively, we show that the proposed model learns a semantically and syntactically meaningful representation of linguistic phrases.

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