The MLLP-UPV Spanish-Portuguese and Portuguese-Spanish Machine Translation Systems for WMT19 Similar Language Translation Task

This paper describes the participation of the MLLP research group of the Universitat Politècnica de València in the WMT 2019 Similar Language Translation Shared Task. We have submitted systems for the Portuguese ↔ Spanish language pair, in both directions. They are based on the Transformer architecture as well as on a novel architecture called 2D alternating RNN. Both systems have been domain adapted through fine-tuning that has been shown to be very effective.