Discrete Structural Planning for Neural Machine Translation

Abstract: Structural planning is important for producing long sentences, which is a missing part in current language generation models. In this work, we add a planning phase in neural machine translation to control the coarse structure of output sentences. The model first generates some planner codes, then predicts real output words conditioned on them. The codes are learned to capture the coarse structure of the target sentence. In order to obtain the codes, we design an end-to-end neural network with a discretization bottleneck, which predicts the simplified part-of-speech tags of target sentences. Experiments show that the translation performance are generally improved by planning ahead. We also find that translations with different structures can be obtained by manipulating the planner codes.