Issue #124 – Towards Enhancing Faithfulness for Neural MT
01 Apr21
Issue #124 – Towards Enhancing Faithfulness for Neural MT
Author: Dr. Karin Sim, Machine Translation Scientist @ Iconic
Introduction
While Neural Machine Translation is generally fluent, it occasionally can be deceptively so, either omitting or adding fragments. In today’s post we examine a method proposed to address this shortcoming and make the model more faithful to the source; Weng et al. (2020) propose a faithfulness-enhanced NMT model, called FENMT.
The Problem
They surmise that there are potentially 3 possible causes for this faithfulness problem in the encoder-decoder framework:
- Some parts of input are hard to encode and therefore not translated correctly.
- The decoder cannot retrieve the correct contextual representation from the encoder.
- In aiming for fluency, the language model encourages common words.
They then propose a novel training strategy