NECTEC’s Participation in WAT-2021

Abstract

In this paper, we report the experimental results of Machine Translation models conducted by a NECTEC team (Team-ID: NECTEC) for the WAT-2021 Myanmar-English translation task (Nakazawa et al., 2021). Basically, our models are ased on neural methods for both directions of English-Myanmar and Myanmar-English language pairs. Most of the existing Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models mainly focus on the conversion of sequential data and do not directly use syntactic information. However, we conduct multisource neural machine translation (NMT) models using the multilingual corpora such as string data corpus, tree data corpus, or POS-tagged data corpus. The multi-source translation is an approach to exploit multiple inputs (e.g. in two different formats) to increase translation accuracy. The RNNbased encoder-decoder model with attention mechanism and transformer architectures have been carried out for our experiment. The experimental results showed that the proposed models of RNN-based architecture outperform the baseline model for English-to-Myanmar translation task, the multi-source and shared-multi-source transformer models yield better translation results than the baseline.