Mike Schuster, "Learning from the move to neural machine translation at Google"

At Google we replaced over the last few years the phrase-based machine translation system by GNMT, the Google Neural Machine Translation system. This talk will describe some of the history of this transition and explain the challenges we faced. As part of the new system we developed and used many features that hadn’t been used before in production-scale translation systems: A large-scale sequence-to-sequence model with attention, sub-word units instead of a full dictionary to address out-of-vocabulary handling and improve translation accuracy, special hardware to improve inference speed, handling of many language pairs in a single model and other techniques that a) made it possible to launch the system at all and b) to significantly improve on previous production-level accuracy. Some of the techniques we used are now standard in many translation systems – we’d like to highlight some of the remaining challenges in interpretability, robustness and possible solutions to them.