Kai Song


2019

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Code-Switching for Enhancing NMT with Pre-Specified Translation
Kai Song | Yue Zhang | Heng Yu | Weihua Luo | Kun Wang | Min Zhang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Leveraging user-provided translation to constrain NMT has practical significance. Existing methods can be classified into two main categories, namely the use of placeholder tags for lexicon words and the use of hard constraints during decoding. Both methods can hurt translation fidelity for various reasons. We investigate a data augmentation method, making code-switched training data by replacing source phrases with their target translations. Our method does not change the MNT model or decoding algorithm, allowing the model to learn lexicon translations by copying source-side target words. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves consistent improvements over existing approaches, improving translation of constrained words without hurting unconstrained words.

2018

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Alibaba’s Neural Machine Translation Systems for WMT18
Yongchao Deng | Shanbo Cheng | Jun Lu | Kai Song | Jingang Wang | Shenglan Wu | Liang Yao | Guchun Zhang | Haibo Zhang | Pei Zhang | Changfeng Zhu | Boxing Chen
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

This paper describes the submission systems of Alibaba for WMT18 shared news translation task. We participated in 5 translation directions including English ↔ Russian, English ↔ Turkish in both directions and English → Chinese. Our systems are based on Google’s Transformer model architecture, into which we integrated the most recent features from the academic research. We also employed most techniques that have been proven effective during the past WMT years, such as BPE, back translation, data selection, model ensembling and reranking, at industrial scale. For some morphologically-rich languages, we also incorporated linguistic knowledge into our neural network. For the translation tasks in which we have participated, our resulting systems achieved the best case sensitive BLEU score in all 5 directions. Notably, our English → Russian system outperformed the second reranked system by 5 BLEU score.

2014

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Syntactic SMT Using a Discriminative Text Generation Model
Yue Zhang | Kai Song | Linfeng Song | Jingbo Zhu | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)