Neural Machine Translation with Characters and Hierarchical Encoding

Most existing Neural Machine Translation models use groups of characters or whole words as their unit of input and output. We propose a model with a hierarchical char2word encoder, that takes individual characters both as input and output. We first argue that this hierarchical representation of the character encoder reduces computational complexity, and show that it improves translation performance. Secondly, by qualitatively studying attention plots from the decoder we find that the model learns to compress common words into a single embedding whereas rare words, such as names and places, are represented character by character.

PDF Abstract

Datasets


  Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods


No methods listed for this paper. Add relevant methods here