Adversarial Neural Machine Translation

https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.06933

Lijun Wu, Yingce Xia, Li Zhao, Fei Tian, Tao Qin, Jianhuang Lai, Tie-Yan Liu

(Submitted on 20 Apr 2017)

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 architecture and name it as Adversarial-NMT. In Adversarial-NMT, the training of the NMT model is assisted by an adversary, which is an elaborately designed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The goal of the adversary is to differentiate the translation result generated by the NMT model from that by human. The goal of the NMT model is to produce high quality translations so as to cheat the adversary. A policy gradient method is leveraged to co-train the NMT model and the adversary. Experimental results on English→French and German→English translation tasks show that Adversarial-NMT can achieve significantly better translation quality than several strong baselines.

Comments:In submission to IJCAI'17Subjects:Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)Cite as:arXiv:1704.06933 [cs.CL] (or arXiv:1704.06933v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

Submission history

From: Fei Tian [view email] 
[v1] Thu, 20 Apr 2017 05:08:47 GMT (210kb,D)