WMT 2016 Multimodal Translation System Description based on Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks with Double-Embeddings

Abstract

Abstr actBidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks (BiRNNs) have shown outstanding results on sequence-to-sequence learning tasks. This architecture becomes specially interesting for multimodal machine translation task, since BiRNNs can deal with images and text. On most translation systems the same word embedding is fed to both BiRNN units. In this paper, we present several experiments to enhance a baseline sequence-to-sequence system (Elliott et al., 2015), for example, by using double embeddings. These embeddings are trained on the forward and backward direction of the input sequence. Our system is trained, validated and tested on the Multi30K dataset (Elliott et al., 2016) in the context of the WMT 2016 Multimodal Translation Task. The obtained results show that the double-embedding approach performs significantly better than the traditional single-embedding one.