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Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate

2014/09/01 by Dzmitry Bahdanau, Kyunghyun Cho, Bahdanau, Dzmitry +3 · 9 voices · 14,622 citations
Computer Science · Mathematics · #Artificial intelligence #Artificial neural network #Bottleneck #Computer science #Encoder #Example-based machine translation #Machine translation #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Natural language processing #Phrase #Sentence #Speech recognition #Topic Modeling #Transfer-based machine translation #Translation (biology) #Word (group theory) #cs.CL #cs.LG #cs.NE #stat.ML

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1409.0473

published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University) · Accepted at ICLR 2015 as oral presentation

openalex publication_date 2014/09/01 · arxiv created 2016/05/19 · arxiv updated 2016/05/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neural network that can be jointly tuned to maximize the translation performance. The models proposed recently for neural machine translation often belong to a family of encoder-decoders and consists of an encoder that encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector from which a decoder generates a translation. In this paper, we conjecture that the use of a fixed-length vector is a bottleneck in improving the performance of this basic encoder-decoder architecture, and propose to extend this by allowing a model to automatically (soft-)search for parts of a source sentence that are relevant to predicting a target word, without having to form these parts as a hard segment explicitly. With this new approach, we achieve a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based system on the task of English-to-French translation. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals that the (soft-)alignments found by the model agree well with our intuition.

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