Most existing machine translation systems operate at the level of words, relying on explicit segmentation to extract tokens. We introduce a neural machine translation (NMT) model that maps a source character sequence to a target character sequence without any segmentation. We employ a character-level convolutional network with max-pooling at the encoder to reduce the length of source representation, allowing the model to be trained at a speed comparable to subword-level models while capturing local regularities. Our character-to-character model outperforms a recently proposed baseline with a subwordlevel encoder on WMT'15 DE-EN and CS-EN, and gives comparable performance on FI-EN and RU-EN. We then demonstrate that it is possible to share a single characterlevel encoder across multiple languages by training a model on a many-to-one translation task. In this multilingual setting, the character-level encoder significantly outperforms the subword-level encoder on all the language pairs. We observe that on CS-EN, FI-EN and RU-EN, the quality of the multilingual character-level translation even surpasses the models specifically trained on that language pair alone, both in terms of the BLEU score and human judgment.
Further, Lee et al. REF proposed the fully character-level NMT model that maps a source character sequence to a target one without any explicit segmentation for both encoder and decoder.
Fully Character-Level Neural Machine Translation without Explicit Segmentation
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Computer Science