Extracting Parallel Sentences from Nonparallel Corpora Using Parallel Hierarchical Attention Network

Collecting parallel sentences from nonparallel data is a long-standing natural language processing research problem. In particular, parallel training sentences are very important for the quality of machine translation systems. While many existing methods have shown encouraging results, they cannot learn various alignment weights in parallel sentences. To address this issue, we propose a novel parallel hierarchical attention neural network which encodes monolingual sentences versus bilingual sentences and construct a classifier to extract parallel sentences. In particular, our attention mechanism structure can learn different alignment weights of words in parallel sentences. Experimental results show that our model can obtain state-of-the-art performance on the English-French, English-German, and English-Chinese dataset of BUCC 2017 shared task about parallel sentences’ extraction