This paper describes the MeMAD project entry to the WMT Multimodal Machine Translation Shared Task. We propose adapting the Transformer neural machine translation (NMT) architecture to a multi-modal setting. In this paper, we also describe the preliminary experiments with text-only translation systems leading us up to this choice. We have the top scoring system for both English-to-German and English-to-French, according to the automatic metrics for flickr18. Our experiments show that the effect of the visual features in our system is small. Our largest gains come from the quality of the underlying text-only NMT system. We find that appropriate use of additional data is effective.
This paper describes multimodal machine translation systems developed jointly by Oregon State University and Baidu Research for WMT 2018 Shared Task on multimodal translation. In this paper, we introduce a simple approach to incorporate image information by feeding image features to the decoder side. We also explore different sequence level training methods including scheduled sampling and reinforcement learning which lead to substantial improvements. Our systems ensemble several models using different architectures and training methods and achieve the best performance for three subtasks: En-De and En-Cs in task 1 and (En+De+Fr)-Cs task 1B.
We introduce a novel multimodal machine translation model that utilizes parallel visual and textual information. Our model jointly optimizes the learning of a shared visual-language embedding and a translator. The model leverages a visual attention grounding mechanism that links the visual semantics with the corresponding textual semantics. Our approach achieves competitive state-of-the-art results on the Multi30K and the Ambiguous COCO datasets. We also collected a new multilingual multimodal product description dataset to simulate a real-world international online shopping scenario. On this dataset, our visual attention grounding model outperforms other methods by a large margin.
In this paper a doubly attentive transformer machine translation model (DATNMT) is presented in which a doubly-attentive transformer decoder normally joins spatial visual features obtained via pretrained convolutional neural networks, conquering any gap between image captioning and translation. In this framework, the transformer decoder figures out how to take care of source-language words and parts of an image freely by methods for two separate attention components in an Enhanced Multi-Head Attention Layer of doubly attentive transformer, as it generates words in the target language. We find that the proposed model can effectively exploit not just the scarce multimodal machine translation data, but also large general-domain text-only machine translation corpora, or image-text image captioning corpora. The experimental results show that the proposed doubly-attentive transformer-decoder performs better than a single-decoder transformer model, and gives the state-of-the-art results in the English-German multimodal machine translation task.
We introduce the Multi30K dataset to stimulate multilingual multimodal research. Recent advances in image description have been demonstrated on English-language datasets almost exclusively, but image description should not be limited to English. This dataset extends the Flickr30K dataset with i) German translations created by professional translators over a subset of the English descriptions, and ii) descriptions crowdsourced independently of the original English descriptions. We outline how the data can be used for multilingual image description and multimodal machine translation, but we anticipate the data will be useful for a broader range of tasks.
Neural sequence to sequence learning recently became a very promising paradigm in machine translation, achieving competitive results with statistical phrase-based systems. In this system description paper, we attempt to utilize several recently published methods used for neural sequential learning in order to build systems for WMT 2016 shared tasks of Automatic Post-Editing and Multimodal Machine Translation.
This paper presents the systems developed by LIUM and CVC for the WMT16 Multimodal Machine Translation challenge. We explored various comparative methods, namely phrase-based systems and attentional recurrent neural networks models trained using monomodal or multimodal data. We also performed a human evaluation in order to estimate the usefulness of multimodal data for human machine translation and image description generation. Our systems obtained the best results for both tasks according to the automatic evaluation metrics BLEU and METEOR.
We introduce multi-modal, attention-based neural machine translation (NMT) models which incorporate visual features into different parts of both the encoder and the decoder. We utilise global image features extracted using a pre-trained convolutional neural network and incorporate them (i) as words in the source sentence, (ii) to initialise the encoder hidden state, and (iii) as additional data to initialise the decoder hidden state. In our experiments, we evaluate how these different strategies to incorporate global image features compare and which ones perform best. We also study the impact that adding synthetic multi-modal, multilingual data brings and find that the additional data have a positive impact on multi-modal models. We report new state-of-the-art results and our best models also significantly improve on a comparable phrase-based Statistical MT (PBSMT) model trained on the Multi30k data set according to all metrics evaluated. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time a purely neural model significantly improves over a PBSMT model on all metrics evaluated on this data set.
We introduce a Multi-modal Neural Machine Translation model in which a doubly-attentive decoder naturally incorporates spatial visual features obtained using pre-trained convolutional neural networks, bridging the gap between image description and translation. Our decoder learns to attend to source-language words and parts of an image independently by means of two separate attention mechanisms as it generates words in the target language. We find that our model can efficiently exploit not just back-translated in-domain multi-modal data but also large general-domain text-only MT corpora. We also report state-of-the-art results on the Multi30k data set.
In this paper, we present nmtpy, a flexible Python toolkit based on Theano for training Neural Machine Translation and other neural sequence-to-sequence architectures. nmtpy decouples the specification of a network from the training and inference utilities to simplify the addition of a new architecture and reduce the amount of boilerplate code to be written. nmtpy has been used for LIUM's top-ranked submissions to WMT Multimodal Machine Translation and News Translation tasks in 2016 and 2017.
We present the results from the second shared task on multimodal machine translation and multilingual image description. Nine teams submitted 19 systems to two tasks. The multimodal translation task, in which the source sentence is supplemented by an image, was extended with a new language (French) and two new test sets. The multilingual image description task was changed such that at test time, only the image is given. Compared to last year, multimodal systems improved, but text-only systems remain competitive.
The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.
This paper describes Oregon State University's submissions to the shared WMT'17 task "multimodal translation task I". In this task, all the sentence pairs are image captions in different languages. The key difference between this task and conventional machine translation is that we have corresponding images as additional information for each sentence pair. In this paper, we introduce a simple but effective system which takes an image shared between different languages, feeding it into the both encoding and decoding side. We report our system's performance for English-French and English-German with Flickr30K (in-domain) and MSCOCO (out-of-domain) datasets. Our system achieves the best performance in TER for English-German for MSCOCO dataset.
Multimodal machine translation is one of the applications that integrates computer vision and language processing. It is a unique task given that in the field of machine translation, many state-of-the-arts algorithms still only employ textual information. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of reinforcement learning in multimodal machine translation. We present a novel algorithm based on the Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C) algorithm that specifically cater to the multimodal machine translation task of the EMNLP 2018 Third Conference on Machine Translation (WMT18). We experiment our proposed algorithm on the Multi30K multilingual English-German image description dataset and the Flickr30K image entity dataset. Our model takes two channels of inputs, image and text, uses translation evaluation metrics as training rewards, and achieves better results than supervised learning MLE baseline models. Furthermore, we discuss the prospects and limitations of using reinforcement learning for machine translation. Our experiment results suggest a promising reinforcement learning solution to the general task of multimodal sequence to sequence learning.