Efficient Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation with Reread and Feedback Mechanism

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How to utilize information sufficiently is a key problem in neural machine translation (NMT), which is effectively improved in rich-resource NMT by leveraging large-scale bilingual sentence pairs. However, for low-resource NMT, lack of bilingual sentence pairs results in poor translation performance; therefore, taking full advantage of global information in the encoding-decoding process is effective for low-resource NMT. In this article, we propose a novel reread-feedback NMT architecture (RFNMT) for using global information. Our architecture builds upon the improved sequence-to-sequence neural network and consists of a double-deck attention-based encoder-decoder framework. In our proposed architecture, the information generated by the first-pass encoding and decoding process flows to the second-pass encoding process for more sufficient parameters initialization and information use. Specifically, we first propose a “reread” mechanism to transfer the outputs of the first-pass encoder to the second-pass encoder, and then the output is used for the initialization of the second-pass encoder. Second, we propose a “feedback” mechanism that transfers the first-pass decoder’s outputs to a second-pass encoder via an important weight model and an improved gated recurrent unit (GRU). Experiments on multiple datasets show that our approach achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art NMT systems, especially in low-resource settings.