title: On the Effectiveness of Quasi Character-Level Models for Machine Translation
abstract: Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models often use subword-level vocabularies to deal with rare or unknown words. Although some studies have shown the effectiveness of purely character-based models, these approaches have resulted in highly expensive models in computational terms. In this work, we explore the advantages of quasi character-level Transformers for low-resource NMT, as well as their ability to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting problem. We first present an empirical study on the effectiveness of these models as a function of the size of the training set. As a result, we found that for data-poor environments, quasi character-level Transformers present a competitive advantage over their large subword-level versions. Similarly, we study the generalization of this phenomenon in different languages, domains, and neural architectures. Finally, we conclude this work by studying the ability of these models to mitigate the effects of catastrophic forgetting in machine translation. Our work suggests that quasi character-level Transformers have a competitive advantage in data-poor environments and, although they do not mitigate the catastrophic forgetting problem, they greatly help to achieve greater consistency between domains.
authors: Salvador Carrión Ponz Francisco Casacuberta Nolla
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