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Main Authors: Shi, Xiangyu, Liang, Yunlong, Xu, Jinan, Chen, Yufeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07419
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author Shi, Xiangyu
Liang, Yunlong
Xu, Jinan
Chen, Yufeng
author_facet Shi, Xiangyu
Liang, Yunlong
Xu, Jinan
Chen, Yufeng
contents Recent works have proven the effectiveness of k-nearest-neighbor machine translation(a.k.a kNN-MT) approaches to produce remarkable improvement in cross-domain translations. However, these models suffer from heavy retrieve overhead on the entire datastore when decoding each token. We observe that during the decoding phase, about 67% to 84% of tokens are unvaried after searching over the corpus datastore, which means most of the tokens cause futile retrievals and introduce unnecessary computational costs by initiating k-nearest-neighbor searches. We consider this phenomenon is explainable in linguistics and propose a simple yet effective multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network to predict whether a token should be translated jointly by the neural machine translation model and probabilities produced by the kNN or just by the neural model. The results show that our method succeeds in reducing redundant retrieval operations and significantly reduces the overhead of kNN retrievals by up to 53% at the expense of a slight decline in translation quality. Moreover, our method could work together with all existing kNN-MT systems. This work has been accepted for publication in the jornal Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ISSN: 2582-9793). The final published version can be found at DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.54364/AAIML.2024.41111
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_07419
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Faster k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation
Shi, Xiangyu
Liang, Yunlong
Xu, Jinan
Chen, Yufeng
Computation and Language
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Recent works have proven the effectiveness of k-nearest-neighbor machine translation(a.k.a kNN-MT) approaches to produce remarkable improvement in cross-domain translations. However, these models suffer from heavy retrieve overhead on the entire datastore when decoding each token. We observe that during the decoding phase, about 67% to 84% of tokens are unvaried after searching over the corpus datastore, which means most of the tokens cause futile retrievals and introduce unnecessary computational costs by initiating k-nearest-neighbor searches. We consider this phenomenon is explainable in linguistics and propose a simple yet effective multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network to predict whether a token should be translated jointly by the neural machine translation model and probabilities produced by the kNN or just by the neural model. The results show that our method succeeds in reducing redundant retrieval operations and significantly reduces the overhead of kNN retrievals by up to 53% at the expense of a slight decline in translation quality. Moreover, our method could work together with all existing kNN-MT systems. This work has been accepted for publication in the jornal Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ISSN: 2582-9793). The final published version can be found at DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.54364/AAIML.2024.41111
title Towards Faster k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation
topic Computation and Language
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07419