Cited by 8,382Natural Language Processing TechniquesTopic ModelingSpeech Recognition and Synthesis

Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation

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Luong, Thang, Pham, Hieu, Manning, Christopher D.·2015·Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Abstract

An attentional mechanism has lately been used to improve neural machine translation (NMT) by selectively focusing on parts of the source sentence during translation.However, there has been little work exploring useful architectures for attention-based NMT.This paper examines two simple and effective classes of attentional mechanism: a global approach which always attends to all source words and a local one that only looks at a subset of source words at a time.We demonstrate the effectiveness of both approaches on the WMT translation tasks between English and German in both directions.With local attention, we achieve a significant gain of 5.0 BLEU points over non-attentional systems that already incorporate known techniques such as dropout.Our ensemble model using different attention architectures yields a new state-of-the-art result in the WMT'15 English to German translation task with 25.9 BLEU points, an improvement of 1.0 BLEU points over the existing best system backed by NMT and an n-gram reranker.1

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  • Various enhancements to attention have been proposed, such as local attention, supervised attention, hierarchical attention, and self-attention.

    “Since then, various enhancements have been proposed, such as local attention (Luong et al. 2015), supervised attention (Mi et al. 2016; Liu et al. 2016), hierarchical attention (Zhao et al. 2018), and self-attention (Vaswani et al. 2017; Yang et al. 2018).”

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  1. Percy Liang, Ben Taskar, and Dan Klein. 2006. Align- ment by agreement. In NAACL.

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Authors
Luong, T., Pham, H., & Manning, C. D.
Affiliations
Stanford University (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Published
2015
Pages
1412-1421
OpenAlex
W1902237438
Cited by
8,382
References
18
Citations by year
2026: 177 · 2025: 454 · 2024: 586 · 2023: 839 · 2022: 985 · 2021: 1356 · 2020: 1354 · 2019: 1372 · 2018: 783 · 2017: 337 · 2016: 133 · 2015: 5 · 2012: 1
FWCI
236.52
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
  • Bloomberg L.P.
  • Nvidia (Tesla K40)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech Recognition and Synthesis
Keywords
attention mechanism, neural machine translation, local attention, global attention, English-German translation, ensemble learning, dropout

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