Byte-based Neural Machine Translation

Abstract

This paper presents experiments compar- ing character-based and byte-based neural machine translation systems. The main motivation of the byte-based neural ma- chine translation system is to build multi- lingual neural machine translation systems that can share the same vocabulary. We compare the performance of both systems in several language pairs and we see that the performance in test is similar for most language pairs while the training time is slightly reduced in the case of byte-based neural machine translation.