Supervised Attentions for Neural Machine Translation

Haitao Mi1, Zhiguo Wang1, Abe Ittycheriah2
1IBM Watson Research Center, 2IBM


Abstract

In this paper, we improve the attention or alignment accuracy of neural machine translation by utilizing the alignments of training sentence pairs. We simply compute the distance between the machine attentions and the “true” alignments, and minimize this cost in the training procedure. Our experiments on large-scale Chinese-to-English task show that our model improves both translation and alignment qualities significantly over the large-vocabulary neural machine translation system, and even beats a state-of-the-art traditional syntax-based system.