IntroVNMT: An Introspective Model for Variational Neural Machine Translation

Authors

  • Xin Sheng University of Science and Technology of China
  • Linli Xu University of Science and Technology of China
  • Junliang Guo University of Science and Technology of China
  • Jingchang Liu Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
  • Ruoyu Zhao University of Science and Technology of China
  • Yinlong Xu University of Science and Technology of China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i05.6411

Abstract

We propose a novel introspective model for variational neural machine translation (IntroVNMT) in this paper, inspired by the recent successful application of introspective variational autoencoder (IntroVAE) in high quality image synthesis. Different from the vanilla variational NMT model, IntroVNMT is capable of improving itself introspectively by evaluating the quality of the generated target sentences according to the high-level latent variables of the real and generated target sentences. As a consequence of introspective training, the proposed model is able to discriminate between the generated and real sentences of the target language via the latent variables generated by the encoder of the model. In this way, IntroVNMT is able to generate more realistic target sentences in practice. In the meantime, IntroVNMT inherits the advantages of the variational autoencoders (VAEs), and the model training process is more stable than the generative adversarial network (GAN) based models. Experimental results on different translation tasks demonstrate that the proposed model can achieve significant improvements over the vanilla variational NMT model.

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Published

2020-04-03

How to Cite

Sheng, X., Xu, L., Guo, J., Liu, J., Zhao, R., & Xu, Y. (2020). IntroVNMT: An Introspective Model for Variational Neural Machine Translation. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34(05), 8830-8837. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i05.6411

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track: Natural Language Processing