Author: Dr. Rohit Gupta, Sr. Machine Translation Scientist @ Iconic It goes without saying that Neural Machine Translation has become state of the art in MT. However, one challenge we still face is developing a single general MT system which works well across a variety of different input types. As we know from long-standing research into domain adaptation, a system trained on patent data doesn’t...
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Author: Dr. Patrik Lambert, Machine Translation Scientist @ Iconic The Neural MT Weekly is back for 2019 after a short break over the holidays! 2018 was a very exciting year for machine translation, as documented over the first 20 articles in this series. What was striking was the pace of development, even in the 6 months since we starting publishing these articles. This was...
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Author: Dr. Raj Patel, Machine Translation Scientist @ Iconic As has been covered a number of times in this series, Neural MT requires good data for training, and acquiring such data for new languages can be costly and not always feasible. One approach in Neural MT literature for improving translation quality for low-resource language is transfer-learning. A common practice is to reuse the model...
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Author: Dr. Patrik Lambert, Machine Translation Scientist @ Iconic Neural Machine Translation is known to be particularly poor at translating out-of-domain data. That is, an engine trained on generic data will be much worse at translating medical documents than an engine trained on medical data. It is much more sensitive to such differences than, say, Statistical MT. This problem is partially solved by domain...
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Author: Dr. Rohit Gupta, Sr. Machine Translation Scientist @ Iconic The term “simultaneous translation” or “simultaneous interpretation” refers to the case where a translator begins translating just a few seconds after a speaker begins speaking, and finishes just a few seconds after the speaker ends. There has been a lot of PR and noise about some recent proclamations which were covered well in a recent article...
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Author: Raj Nath Patel, Machine Translation Scientist @ Iconic For all the benefits Neural MT has brought in terms of translation quality, producing output quickly and efficiently is still a challenge for developers. All things being equal, Neural MT is slower than its statistical counterpart. This is particularly the case when running translation on standard processors (CPUs) as opposed to faster, more powerful (but also more...
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Author: Dr. Patrik Lambert, Machine Translation Scientist @ Iconic In a previous guest post in this series, Prof. Andy Way explained how to create training data for Neural MT through back-translation. This technique involves translating monolingual data in the target language into the source language to obtain a parallel corpus of "synthetic" source and "authentic" target data - so called back-translation. Andy reported interesting findings whereby,...
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Author: Dr. Rohit Gupta, Sr. Machine Translation Scientist @ Iconic In this week's post, we take a look at document-level neural machine translation. Most, if not all existing approaches to machine translation operate on the sentence level. That is to say, when translating a document, it is actually split up into individual sentences or segments, and they are processed independently of each other. With document-level Neural MT,...
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Author: Dr. John Tinsley, CEO @ Iconic As a machine translation provider, one of the questions we've been asking ourselves most frequently over the last 18 months has been, “When should we switch an existing production deployment to Neural MT?"....
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Author: Raj Nath Patel, Machine Translation Scientist @ Iconic What are the different approaches to Neural MT? Since its relatively recent advent, the underlying technology has been based on one of three main architectures:...
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