Guiding Neural Machine Translation with Retrieved Translation Template

Abstract

While various neural machine translation (NMT) methods have integrated multiple prior knowledge to guide the translation, no research is available on combining with source-target bilingual translation template. In this paper, we firstly propose a maximal-length noun phrase template (MNP-Template), which constructs a novel translation template focusing on the constituency syntactic structure. Secondly, building on the multi-source transformer framework, we design a template-based machine translation (TBMT) model to integrate the syntactic knowledge of the retrieved target template similar to the ground-truth translation in the NMT decoder. Experiment results show the effectiveness of MNP- Template and TBMT on test subsets filtered by the fuzzy match score. Moreover, our method achieves significant improvement in out-of-domain test sets, which well-validated the university across diverse domains.