RESEARCH

Neural Machine Translation with Byte-Level Subwords

February 04, 2020

Abstract

Almost all existing machine translation models are built on top of character-based vocabularies: characters, subwords or words. Rare characters from noisy text or character-rich languages such as Japanese and Chinese however can unnecessarily take up vocabulary slots and limit its compactness. Representing text at the level of bytes and using the 256 byte set as vocabulary is a potential solution to this issue. High computational cost has however prevented it from being widely deployed or used in practice. In this paper, we investigate byte-level subwords, specifically byte-level BPE (BBPE), which is compacter than character vocabulary and has no out-of-vocabulary tokens, but is more efficient than using pure bytes only is. We claim that contextualizing BBPE embeddings is necessary, which can be implemented by a convolutional or recurrent layer. Our experiments show that BBPE has comparable performance to BPE while its size is only 1/8 of that for BPE. In the multilingual setting, BBPE maximizes vocabulary sharing across many languages and achieves better translation quality. Moreover, we show that BBPE enables transferring models between languages with non-overlapping character sets.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Changhan Wang

Jiatao Gu

Kyunghyun Cho

Publisher

AAAI

Related Publications

February 07, 2025

RESEARCH

SPEECH & AUDIO

Meta Audiobox Aesthetics: Unified Automatic Quality Assessment for Speech, Music, and Sound

Andros Tjandra, Yi-Chiao Wu, Baishan Guo, John Hoffman, Brian Ellis, Apoorv Vyas, Bowen Shi, Sanyuan Chen, Matt Le, Nick Zacharov, Carleigh Wood, Ann Lee, Wei-Ning Hsu

February 07, 2025

February 06, 2025

RESEARCH

NLP

Brain-to-Text Decoding: A Non-invasive Approach via Typing

Jarod Levy, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Svetlana Pinet, Jérémy Rapin, Hubert Jacob Banville, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Jean Remi King

February 06, 2025

February 06, 2025

RESEARCH

NLP

From Thought to Action: How a Hierarchy of Neural Dynamics Supports Language Production

Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Jarod Levy, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Jérémy Rapin, F.-Xavier Alario, Pierre Bourdillon, Svetlana Pinet, Jean Remi King

February 06, 2025

November 28, 2022

RESEARCH

CORE MACHINE LEARNING

Neural Attentive Circuits

Nicolas Ballas, Bernhard Schölkopf, Chris Pal, Francesco Locatello, Li Erran, Martin Weiss, Nasim Rahaman, Yoshua Bengio

November 28, 2022

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.