P17-1012@ACL

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#1 A Convolutional Encoder Model for Neural Machine Translation [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi2] [REL]

Authors: Jonas Gehring, Michael Auli, David Grangier, Yann Dauphin

The prevalent approach to neural machine translation relies on bi-directional LSTMs to encode the source sentence. We present a faster and simpler architecture based on a succession of convolutional layers. This allows to encode the source sentence simultaneously compared to recurrent networks for which computation is constrained by temporal dependencies. On WMT’16 English-Romanian translation we achieve competitive accuracy to the state-of-the-art and on WMT’15 English-German we outperform several recently published results. Our models obtain almost the same accuracy as a very deep LSTM setup on WMT’14 English-French translation. We speed up CPU decoding by more than two times at the same or higher accuracy as a strong bi-directional LSTM.