Continuous Space Translation Models with Neural Networks

The use of conventional maximum likelihood estimates hinders the performance of existing phrase-based translation models. For lack of sufficient training data, most models only consider a small amount of context. As a partial remedy, we explore here several continuous space translation models, where translation probabilities are estimated using a continuous representation of translation units in lieu of standard discrete representations. In order to handle a large set of translation units, these representations and the associated estimates are jointly computed using a multi-layer neural network with a SOUL architecture. In small scale and large scale English to French experiments, we show that the resulting models can effectively be trained and used on top of a n-gram translation system, delivering significant improvements in performance.