Thesis of Alexandre Berard

Neural Machine Translation Architectures and Applications

This thesis is centered on two main objectives: adaptation of Neural Machine Translation techniques to new tasks and research replication. Our efforts towards research replication have led to the production of two resources: MultiVec, a framework that facilitates the use of several techniques related to word embeddings (Word2vec, Bivec and Paragraph Vector); and a framework for Neural Machine Translation that implements several architectures and can be used for regular MT, Automatic Post-Editing, and Speech Recognition or Translation. These two resources are publicly available and now extensively used by the research community. We extend our NMT framework to work on three related tasks: Machine Translation (MT), Automatic Speech Translation (AST) and Automatic Post-Editing (APE). For the machine translation task, we replicate pioneer neural-based work, and do a case study on TED talks where we advance the state-of-the-art. Automatic speech translation consists in translating speech from one language to text in another language. In this thesis, we focus on the unexplored problem of end-to-end speech translation, which does not use an intermediate source-language text transcription. We propose the first model for end-to-end AST and apply it on two benchmarks: translation of audiobooks and of basic travel expressions. Our final task is automatic post-editing, which consists in automatically correcting the outputs of an MT system in a black-box scenario, by training on data that was produced by human post-editors. We replicate and extend published results on the WMT 2016 and 2017 tasks, and propose new neural architectures for low-resource automatic post-editing.

Jury

- Directeur de thèse : Olivier Pietquin, Laurent Besacier - Rapporteurs : Béatrice Daille, Philippe Langlais - Examinateurs : Pascale Sébillot, Marc Tommasi, François Yvon

Thesis of the team defended on 15/06/2018