Rephrasing the Reference for Non-autoregressive Machine Translation

Abstract

Non-autoregressive neural machine translation (NAT) models suffer from the multi-modality problem that there may exist multiple possible translations of a source sentence, so the reference sentence may be inappropriate for the training when the NAT output is closer to other translations. In response to this problem, we introduce a rephraser to provide a better training target for NAT by rephrasing the reference sentence according to the NAT output. As we train NAT based on the rephraser output rather than the reference sentence, the rephraser output should fit well with the NAT output and not deviate too far from the reference, which can be quantified as reward functions and optimized by reinforcement learning. Experiments on major WMT benchmarks and NAT baselines show that our approach consistently improves the translation quality of NAT. Specifically, our best variant achieves comparable performance to the autoregressive Transformer, while being 14.7 times more efficient in inference.