This paper describes the statistical machine translation system developed at RWTH Aachen University for the English→German and German→English translation tasks of the EMNLP 2017 Second Conference on Machine Translation (WMT 2017). We use ensembles of attention-based neural machine translation system for both directions. We use the provided parallel and synthetic data to train the models. In add...

This paper describes the statistical machine translation system developed at RWTH Aachen University for the German→English translation task of the EMNLP 2015 Tenth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT 2015). A phrase-based machine translation system was applied and augmented with hierarchical phrase reordering and word class language models. Further, we ran discriminative maximum ex...

Out-of-vocabulary word translation is a major problem for the translation of low-resource languages that suffer from a lack of parallel training data. This paper evaluates the contributions of target-language context models towards the translation of OOV words, specifically in those cases where OOV translations are derived from external knowledge sources, such as dictionaries. We develop both n...

We present a three-pronged approach to improving Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), building on recent success in the application of neural networks to SMT. First, we propose new features based on neural networks to model various nonlocal translation phenomena. Second, we augment the architecture of the neural network with tensor layers that capture important higher-order interaction among ...

In spite of the recent success of neural machine translation (NMT) in standard benchmarks, the lack of large parallel corpora poses a major practical problem for many language pairs. There have been several proposals to alleviate this issue with, for instance, triangulation and semi-supervised learning techniques, but they still require a strong cross-lingual signal. In this work, we completely...

Draft of textbook chapter on neural machine translation. a comprehensive treatment of the topic, ranging from introduction to neural networks, computation graphs, description of the currently dominant attentional sequence-to-sequence model, recent refinements, alternative architectures and challenges. Written as chapter for the textbook Statistical Machine Translation. Used in the JHU Fall 2017...

We present an interactive translation prediction method based on neural machine translation. Even with the same translation quality of the underlying machine translation systems, the neural prediction method yields much higher word prediction accuracy (61.6% vs. 43.3%) than the traditional method based on search graphs, mainly due to better recovery from errors. We also develop efficient means ...

In this paper, we study a new learning paradigm for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Instead of maximizing the likelihood of the human translation as in previous works, we minimize the distinction between human translation and the translation given by a NMT model. To achieve this goal, inspired by the recent success of generative adversarial networks (GANs), we employ an adversarial training a...

We build a multi-source machine translation model and train it to maximize the probability of a target English string given French and German sources. Using the neural encoderdecoder framework, we explore several combination methods and report up to +4.8 Bleu increases on top of a very strong attentionbased neural translation model.