Question: What are the main contributions of this paper?
Evidence: Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved the state-of-the-art results on a mass of language pairs with varying structural differences, such as English-French BIBREF0, BIBREF1 and Chinese-English BIBREF2. However, so far not much is known about how and why NMT works, which pose great challenges for debugging NMT models and designing optimal architectures.
The understanding of NMT models has been approached primarily from two complementary perspectives. The first thread of work aims to understand the importance of representations by analyzing the linguistic information embedded in representation vectors BIBREF3, BIBREF4 or hidden units BIBREF5, BIBREF6. Another direction focuses on understanding the importance of input words by interpreting the input-output behavior of NMT models. Previous work BIBREF7 treats NMT models as black-boxes and provides explanations that closely resemble the attention scores in NMT models. However, recent studies reveal that attention does not provide meaningful explanations since the relationship between attention scores and model output is unclear BIBREF8.
In this paper, we focus on the second thread and try to open the black-box by exploiting the gradients in NMT generation, which aims to estimate the word importance better. Specifically, we employ the integrated gradients method BIBREF9 to attribute the output to the input words with the integration of first-order derivatives. We justify the gradient-based approach via quantitative comparison with black-box methods on a couple of perturbation operations, several language pairs, and two representative model architectures, demonstrating its superiority on estimating word importance.
We analyze the linguistic behaviors of words with the importance and show its potential to improve NMT models. First, we leverage the word importance to identify input words that are under-translated by NMT models. Experimental results show that the gradient-based approach outperforms both the best black-box method and other comparative methods. Second, we analyze the linguistic roles of identified important words, and find that words of certain syntactic categories have higher importance while the categories vary across language. For example, nouns are more important for Chinese$\Rightarrow $English translation, while prepositions are more important for English-French and -Japanese translation. This finding can inspire better design principles of NMT architectures for different language pairs. For instance, a better architecture for a given language pair should consider its own language characteristics.
Our main contributions are:  • Our study demonstrates the necessity and effectiveness of exploiting the intermediate gradients for estimating word importance. • We find that word importance is useful for understanding NMT by identifying undertranslated words.  • We provide empirical support for the design principle of NMT architectures: essential inductive bias (e.g., language characteristics) should be considered for model design.
Answer: • Their study demonstrates the necessity and effectiveness of exploiting the intermediate gradients for estimating word importance. • They find that word importance is useful for understanding NMT by identifying undertranslated words. • They provide empirical support for the design principle of NMT architectures: essential inductive bias should be considered for model design.