Multi-modal neural machine translation with deep semantic interactions

Abstract

Based on the conventional attentional encoder-decoder framework, multi-modal neural machine translation (NMT) further incorporates spatial visual features through a separate visual attention mechanism. In this aspect, most current multi-modal NMT models first separately learn the semantic representations of text and image and then independently produce two modalities of context vectors for word predictions, neglecting their semantic interactions. In this paper, we argue that learning text-image semantic interactions is more reasonable in the sense of jointly modeling two modalities for multi-modal NMT and propose a novel multi-modal NMT model with deep semantic interactions. Specifically, our model extends the conventional multi-modal NMT by introducing the following two attention neural networks: (1) a bi-directional attention network for modeling text and image representations, where the semantic representations of text are learned by referring to the image representations, and vice versa; (2) a co-attention network for refining text and image context vectors, which first summarizes the text into a context vector, then attends it to the image for obtaining the text-aware visual context vector. The final context vector is calculated by re-attending the visual context vector to the text. Results on the Multi30k dataset for different language pairs show that our model significantly improves on the state-of-the-art baselines. We have released our code athttps://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/MNMT.