Blog
The latest from Google Research
Building Your Own Neural Machine Translation System in TensorFlow
Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Posted by Thang Luong, Research Scientist, and Eugene Brevdo, Staff Software Engineer, Google Brain Team
Machine translation – the task of automatically translating between languages – is one of the most active research areas in the machine learning community. Among the many approaches to machine translation, sequence-to-sequence ("seq2seq") models [1, 2] have recently enjoyed great success and have become the de facto standard in most commercial translation systems, such as
Google Translate
, thanks to its ability to use
deep neural networks to capture sentence meanings
. However, while there is an abundance of material on seq2seq models such as
OpenNMT
or
tf-seq2seq
, there is a lack of material that teaches people both the knowledge and the skills to easily build high-quality translation systems.
Today we are happy to announce a new
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) tutorial
for
TensorFlow
that gives readers a full understanding of seq2seq models and shows how to build a competitive translation model from scratch. The tutorial is aimed at making the process as simple as possible, starting with some background knowledge on NMT and walking through code details to build a vanilla system. It then dives into the attention mechanism [3, 4], a key ingredient that allows NMT systems to handle long sentences. Finally, the tutorial provides details on how to replicate key features in the Google’s NMT (GNMT) system [5] to train on multiple GPUs.
The tutorial also contains detailed benchmark results, which users can replicate on their own. Our models provide a strong open-source baseline with performance on par with GNMT results [5]. We achieve 24.4 BLEU points on the popular
WMT’14
English-German translation task.
Other benchmark results (English-Vietnamese, German-English) can be found in the tutorial.
In addition, this tutorial showcases the fully dynamic seq2seq API (released with
TensorFlow 1.2
) aimed at making building seq2seq models clean and easy:
Easily read and preprocess dynamically sized input sequences using the new input pipeline in
tf.contrib.data
.
Use padded batching and sequence length bucketing to improve training and inference speeds.
Train seq2seq models using popular architectures and training schedules, including several types of attention and scheduled sampling.
Perform inference in seq2seq models using in-graph beam search.
Optimize seq2seq models for multi-GPU settings.
We hope this will help spur the creation of, and experimentation with, many new NMT models by the research community. To get started on your own research, check out the tutorial on
GitHub
!
Core contributors
Thang Luong, Eugene Brevdo, and Rui Zhao.
Acknowledgements
We would like to especially thank our collaborator on the NMT project, Rui Zhao. Without his tireless effort, this tutorial would not have been possible. Additional thanks go to Denny Britz, Anna Goldie, Derek Murray, and Cinjon Resnick for their work bringing new features to TensorFlow and the seq2seq library. Lastly, we thank Lukasz Kaiser for the initial help on the seq2seq codebase; Quoc Le for the suggestion to replicate GNMT; Yonghui Wu and Zhifeng Chen for details on the GNMT systems; as well as the
Google Brain team
for their support and feedback!
References
[1]
Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks
,
Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc V. Le. NIPS, 2014.
[2]
Learning phrase representations using RNN encoder-decoder for statistical machine translation
,
Kyunghyun Cho, Bart Van Merrienboer, Caglar Gulcehre, Dzmitry Bahdanau, Fethi Bougares, Holger Schwenk, and Yoshua Bengio. EMNLP 2014.
[3]
Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate
,
Dzmitry Bahdanau, Kyunghyun Cho, and Yoshua Bengio. ICLR, 2015.
[4]
Effective approaches to attention-based neural machine translation
,
Minh-Thang Luong, Hieu Pham, and Christopher D Manning. EMNLP, 2015.
[5]
Google’s Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation
,
Yonghui Wu, Mike Schuster, Zhifeng Chen, Quoc V. Le, Mohammad Norouzi, Wolfgang Macherey, Maxim Krikun, Yuan Cao, Qin Gao, Klaus Macherey, Jeff Klingner, Apurva Shah, Melvin Johnson, Xiaobing Liu, Łukasz Kaiser, Stephan Gouws, Yoshikiyo Kato, Taku Kudo, Hideto Kazawa, Keith Stevens, George Kurian, Nishant Patil, Wei Wang, Cliff Young, Jason Smith, Jason Riesa, Alex Rudnick, Oriol Vinyals, Greg Corrado, Macduff Hughes, Jeffrey Dean. Technical Report, 2016.
Labels
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
AI
AI for Social Good
Algorithms
Android
Android Wear
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Art
Audio
Augmented Reality
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
AutoML
Awards
BigQuery
Cantonese
Chemistry
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Compression
Computational Imaging
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
Data Discovery
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
DeepDream
DeepMind
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
electronics
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Europe
Exacycle
Expander
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Gboard
Gmail
Google Accelerated Science
Google Books
Google Brain
Google Cloud Platform
Google Docs
Google Drive
Google Genomics
Google Maps
Google Photos
Google Play Apps
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Trips
Google Voice Search
Google+
Government
grants
Graph
Graph Mining
Hardware
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICCV
ICLR
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
India
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
Kaggle
KDD
Keyboard Input
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Low-Light Photography
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Perception
Machine Translation
Magenta
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
materials science
Mixed Reality
ML
ML Fairness
MOOC
Moore's Law
Multimodal Learning
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
NeurIPS
Nexus
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
On-device Learning
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
optimization
osdi
osdi10
patents
Peer Review
ph.d. fellowship
PhD Fellowship
PhotoScan
Physics
PiLab
Pixel
Policy
Professional Development
Proposals
Public Data Explorer
publication
Publications
Quantum AI
Quantum Computing
Recommender Systems
Reinforcement Learning
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Responsible AI
Robotics
schema.org
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
Self-Supervised Learning
Semantic Models
Semi-supervised Learning
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Social Networks
Software
Sound Search
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Style Transfer
Supervised Learning
Systems
TensorBoard
TensorFlow
TPU
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
Unsupervised Learning
User Experience
video
Video Analysis
Virtual Reality
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
Year in Review
YouTube
Archive
2022
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2021
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2020
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2019
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Follow @googleai
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
