Chinese–Spanish neural machine translation enhanced with character and word bitmap fonts

Recently, machine translation systems based on neural networks have reached state-of-the-art results for some pairs of languages (e.g., German–English). In this paper, we are investigating the performance of neural machine translation in Chinese–Spanish, which is a challenging language pair. Given t...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Ruiz Costa-Jussà, Marta|||0000-0002-5703-520X, Aldón Mínguez, David, Rodríguez Fonollosa, José Adrián|||0000-0001-9513-7939
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2017
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/104271
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/104271
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10590-017-9196-0
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Machine translating
Bitmap fonts
Chinese–Spanish
Neural machine translation
Xarxes neuronals (Informàtica)
Traducció automàtica
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica
Descripción
Sumario:Recently, machine translation systems based on neural networks have reached state-of-the-art results for some pairs of languages (e.g., German–English). In this paper, we are investigating the performance of neural machine translation in Chinese–Spanish, which is a challenging language pair. Given that the meaning of a Chinese word can be related to its graphical representation, this work aims to enhance neural machine translation by using as input a combination of: words or characters and their corresponding bitmap fonts. The fact of performing the interpretation of every word or character as a bitmap font generates more informed vectorial representations. Best results are obtained when using words plus their bitmap fonts obtaining an improvement (over a competitive neural MT baseline system) of almost six BLEU, five METEOR points and ranked coherently better in the human evaluation.