This week, I will discuss Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation, a paper from this year ICML that takes advantage of overlooked representation learning capabilities of machine translation models. This paper’s idea is pretty simple and is basically the same as in the previous work on nearest neighbor language models. The paper implicitly argues (or at least I think it does) that the final softmax layer of the MT models is too simplifying and thus pose a sort of information bottleneck, even […]

For quite a while, machine translation is approached as a behaviorist simulation. Don’t you know what a good translation is? It does not matter, you can just simulate what humans do. Don’t you know how to measure if something is a good translation? It does not matter, you can simulate what humans do again. Things seem easy. We learn how to translate from tons of training data that were translated by humans. When we want to measure how well the […]

Researchers concerned with machine translation speed invented several methods that are supposed to significantly speed up the translation while maintaining as much as possible from the translation quality of the state-of-the-art models. The methods are usually based on generating as many words as possible in parallel. State-of-the-art models do not generate in parallel, they are autoregressive: it means that they generate words one by one and condition the decisions about the next words on the previously generated words. On the […]