Fast Lexically Constrained Decoding with Dynamic Beam Allocation for Neural Machine Translation

Matt Post, David Vilar


Abstract
The end-to-end nature of neural machine translation (NMT) removes many ways of manually guiding the translation process that were available in older paradigms. Recent work, however, has introduced a new capability: lexically constrained or guided decoding, a modification to beam search that forces the inclusion of pre-specified words and phrases in the output. However, while theoretically sound, existing approaches have computational complexities that are either linear (Hokamp and Liu, 2017) or exponential (Anderson et al., 2017) in the number of constraints. We present a algorithm for lexically constrained decoding with a complexity of O(1) in the number of constraints. We demonstrate the algorithm’s remarkable ability to properly place these constraints, and use it to explore the shaky relationship between model and BLEU scores. Our implementation is available as part of Sockeye.
Anthology ID:
N18-1119
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1314–1324
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1119
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1119
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matt Post and David Vilar. 2018. Fast Lexically Constrained Decoding with Dynamic Beam Allocation for Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 1314–1324, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fast Lexically Constrained Decoding with Dynamic Beam Allocation for Neural Machine Translation (Post & Vilar, NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1119.pdf