{"id":950634,"date":"2023-06-19T16:25:01","date_gmt":"2023-06-19T23:25:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=950634"},"modified":"2023-06-19T16:25:01","modified_gmt":"2023-06-19T23:25:01","slug":"extract-and-attend-improving-entity-translation-in-neural-machine-translation","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/extract-and-attend-improving-entity-translation-in-neural-machine-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"Extract and Attend: Improving Entity Translation in Neural Machine Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

While Neural Machine Translation(NMT) has achieved great progress in recent years, it still suffers from inaccurate translation of entities (e.g., person\/organization name, location), due to the lack of entity training instances. When we humans encounter an unknown entity during translation, we usually first look up in a dictionary and then organize the entity translation together with the translations of other parts to form a smooth target sentence. Inspired by this translation process, we propose an Extract-and-Attend approach to enhance entity translation in NMT, where the translation candidates of source entities are first extracted from a dictionary and then attended to by the NMT model to generate the target sentence. Specifically, the translation candidates are extracted by first detecting the entities in a source sentence and then translating the entities through looking up in a dictionary. Then, the extracted candidates are added as a prefix of the decoder input to be attended to by the decoder when generating the target sentence through self-attention. Experiments conducted on En-Zh and En-Ru demonstrate that the proposed method is effective on improving both the translation accuracy of entities and the overall translation quality, with up to 35% reduction on entity error rate and 0.85 gain on BLEU and 13.8 gain on COMET.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While Neural Machine Translation(NMT) has achieved great progress in recent years, it still suffers from inaccurate translation of entities (e.g., person\/organization name, location), due to the lack of entity training instances. When we humans encounter an unknown entity during translation, we usually first look up in a dictionary and then organize the entity translation together 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