Designers of statistical machine translation (SMT) systems have begun to employ tree-structured translation models. Systems involving tree-structured translation models tend to be complex. This article aims to reduce the conceptual complexity of such systems, in order to make them easier to design, implement, debug, use, study, understand, explain, modify, and improve. In service of this goal, the article extends the theory of semiring parsing to arrive at a novel abstract parsing algorithm with five functional parameters: a logic, a grammar, a semiring, a search strategy, and a termination condition. The article then shows that all the common algorithms that revolve around tree-structured translation models, including hierarchical alignment, inference for parameter estimation, translation, and structured evaluation, can be derived by generalizing two of these parameters -- the grammar and the logic. The article culminates with a recipe for using such generalized parsers to train, apply, and evaluate an SMT system that is driven by tree-structured translation models.
The addition of syntax-aware decoding in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems requires an effective tree-structured neural network, a syntax-aware attention model and a language generation model that is sensitive to sentence structure. We exploit a top-down tree-structured model called DRNN (Doubly-Recurrent Neural Networks) first proposed by Alvarez-Melis and Jaakola (2017) to create an NMT model called Seq2DRNN that combines a sequential encoder with tree-structured decoding augmented with a syntax-aware attention model. Unlike previous approaches to syntax-based NMT which use dependency…
This paper presents a novel neural machine translation model which jointly learns translation and source-side latent graph representations of sentences. Unlike existing pipelined approaches using syntactic parsers, our end-to-end model learns a latent graph parser as part of the encoder of an attention-based neural machine translation model, and thus the parser is optimized according to the translation objective. In experiments, we first show that our model compares favorably with state-of-the-art sequential and pipelined syntax-based NMT models. We also show that the performance of our model …
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院计算技术研究所);Dublin City University(都柏林城市大学)
Most of the syntax-based metrics obtain the similarity by comparing the sub-structures extracted from the trees of hypothesis and reference. These sub-structures are defined by human and can't express all the information in the trees because of the limited length of sub-structures. In addition, the overlapped parts between these sub-structures are computed repeatedly. To avoid these problems, we propose a novel automatic evaluation metric based on dependency parsing model, with no need to define sub-structures by human. First, we train a dependency parsing model by the reference dependency tre…
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation(语言、认知与计算研究所);School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学信息学院)
Recent work in cross-lingual semantic parsing has successfully applied machine translation to localize parsers to new languages. However, these advances assume access to high-quality machine translation systems and word alignment tools. We remove these assumptions and study cross-lingual semantic parsing as a zero-shot problem, without parallel data (i.e., utterance-logical form pairs) for new languages. We propose a multi-task encoder-decoder model to transfer parsing knowledge to additional languages using only English-logical form paired data and in-domain natural language corpora in each n…
Tianjin University(天津大学);Westlake Institute for Advanced Study(西湖高等研究院);Soochow University(苏州大学)
Treebank translation is a promising method for cross-lingual transfer of syntactic dependency knowledge. The basic idea is to map dependency arcs from a source treebank to its target translation according to word alignments. This method, however, can suffer from imperfect alignment between source and target words. To address this problem, we investigate syntactic transfer by code mixing, translating only confident words in a source treebank. Cross-lingual word embeddings are leveraged for transferring syntactic knowledge to the target from the resulting code-mixed treebank. Experiments on Univ…
Due to the absence of labeled data, discourse parsing still remains challenging in some languages. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient method to conduct zero-shot Chinese text-level dependency parsing by leveraging English discourse labeled data and parsing techniques. We first construct the Chinese-English mapping from the level of sentence and elementary discourse unit (EDU), and then exploit the parsing results of the corresponding English translations to obtain the discourse trees for the Chinese text. This method can automatically conduct Chinese discourse parsing, with no ne…
Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University(莫纳什大学信息技术学院)
Neural machine translation requires large amounts of parallel training text to learn a reasonable-quality translation model. This is particularly inconvenient for language pairs for which enough parallel text is not available. In this paper, we use monolingual linguistic resources in the source side to address this challenging problem based on a multi-task learning approach. More specifically, we scaffold the machine translation task on auxiliary tasks including semantic parsing, syntactic parsing, and named-entity recognition. This effectively injects semantic and/or syntactic knowledge into …
Implicit discourse relation classification is one of the most challenging and important tasks in discourse parsing, due to the lack of connective as strong linguistic cues. A principle bottleneck to further improvement is the shortage of training data (ca.~16k instances in the PDTB). Shi et al. (2017) proposed to acquire additional data by exploiting connectives in translation: human translators mark discourse relations which are implicit in the source language explicitly in the translation. Using back-translations of such explicitated connectives improves discourse relation parsing performanc…
In machine translation it is common phenomenon that machine-readable dictionaries and standard parsing rules are not enough to ensure accuracy in parsing and translating English phrases into Korean language, which is revealed in misleading translation results due to consequent structural and semantic ambiguities. This paper aims to suggest a solution to structural and semantic ambiguities due to the idiomaticity and non-grammaticalness of phrases commonly used in English language by applying bilingual phrase database in English-Korean Machine Translation (EKMT). This paper firstly clarifies wh…
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation(语言、认知与计算研究所);School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学信息学院)
Recent progress in semantic parsing scarcely considers languages other than English but professional translation can be prohibitively expensive. We adapt a semantic parser trained on a single language, such as English, to new languages and multiple domains with minimal annotation. We query if machine translation is an adequate substitute for training data, and extend this to investigate bootstrapping using joint training with English, paraphrasing, and multilingual pre-trained models. We develop a Transformer-based parser combining paraphrases by ensembling attention over multiple encoders and…
Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR(新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究所)
Text discourse parsing plays an important role in understanding information flow and argumentative structure in natural language. Previous research under the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has mostly focused on inducing and evaluating models from the English treebank. However, the parsing tasks for other languages such as German, Dutch, and Portuguese are still challenging due to the shortage of annotated data. In this work, we investigate two approaches to establish a neural, cross-lingual discourse parser via: (1) utilizing multilingual vector representations; and (2) adopting segment-lev…
The Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a representation for open-domain rich semantics, with potential use in fields like event extraction and machine translation. Node generation, typically done using a simple dictionary lookup, is currently an important limiting factor in AMR parsing. We propose a small set of actions that derive AMR subgraphs by transformations on spans of text, which allows for more robust learning of this stage. Our set of construction actions generalize better than the previous approach, and can be learned with a simple classifier. We improve on the previous state-…
Syntactic parsing is a necessary task which is required for NLP applications including machine translation. It is a challenging task to develop a qualitative parser for morphological rich and agglutinative languages. Syntactic analysis is used to understand the grammatical structure of a natural language sentence. It outputs all the grammatical information of each word and its constituent. Also issues related to it help us to understand the language in a more detailed way. This literature survey is groundwork to understand the different parser development for Indian languages and various appro…
MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences(麻省理工学院脑与认知科学系)
The meaning of a natural language utterance is largely determined from its syntax and words. Additionally, there is evidence that humans process an utterance by separating knowledge about the lexicon from syntax knowledge. Theories from semantics and neuroscience claim that complete word meanings are not encoded in the representation of syntax. In this paper, we propose neural units that can enforce this constraint over an LSTM encoder and decoder. We demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance across a variety of domains including semantic parsing, syntactic parsing, and Engli…
Linear embedding transformation has been shown to be effective for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks and achieve surprisingly promising results. However, cross-lingual embedding space mapping is usually studied in static word-level embeddings, where a space transformation is derived by aligning representations of translation pairs that are referred from dictionaries. We move further from this line and investigate a contextual embedding alignment approach which is sense-level and dictionary-free. To enhance the quality of the mapping, we also provide a deep view of properties of contextual…
Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing has experienced a notable growth in performance in the last two years, due both to the impact of transfer learning and the development of novel architectures specific to AMR. At the same time, self-learning techniques have helped push the performance boundaries of other natural language processing applications, such as machine translation or question answering. In this paper, we explore different ways in which trained models can be applied to improve AMR parsing performance, including generation of synthetic text and AMR annotations as well as refi…
This paper describes the submission from the University of Helsinki to the shared task on cross-lingual dependency parsing at VarDial 2017. We present work on annotation projection and treebank translation that gave good results for all three target languages in the test set. In particular, Slovak seems to work well with information coming from the Czech treebank, which is in line with related work. The attachment scores for cross-lingual models even surpass the fully supervised models trained on the target language treebank. Croatian is the most difficult language in the test set and the impr…
In the literature, the research on abstract meaning representation (AMR) parsing is much restricted by the size of human-curated dataset which is critical to build an AMR parser with good performance. To alleviate such data size restriction, pre-trained models have been drawing more and more attention in AMR parsing. However, previous pre-trained models, like BERT, are implemented for general purpose which may not work as expected for the specific task of AMR parsing. In this paper, we focus on sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) AMR parsing and propose a seq2seq pre-training approach to build pre-…
In this paper we present an application of explanation-based learning (EBL) in the parsing module of a real-time English-Spanish machine translation system designed to translate closed captions. We discuss the efficiency/coverage trade-offs available in EBL and introduce the techniques we use to increase coverage while maintaining a high level of space and time efficiency. Our performance results indicate that this approach is effective.
Monash University(莫纳什大学);IIT Bombay(印度理工学院孟买分校);IITB-Monash Research Academy(印度理工学院孟买分校-莫纳什大学联合研究院)
In this paper, we attempt to solve the problem of Prepositional Phrase (PP) attachments in English. The motivation for the work comes from NLP applications like Machine Translation, for which, getting the correct attachment of prepositions is very crucial. The idea is to correct the PP-attachments for a sentence with the help of alignments from parallel data in another language. The novelty of our work lies in the formulation of the problem into a dual decomposition based algorithm that enforces agreement between the parse trees from two languages as a constraint. Experiments were performed on…
We propose a system for parsing and translating natural language that learns from examples and uses some background knowledge. As our parsing model we choose a deterministic shift-reduce type parser that integrates part-of-speech tagging and syntactic and semantic processing. Applying machine learning techniques, the system uses parse action examples acquired under supervision to generate a parser in the form of a decision structure, a generalization of decision trees. To learn good parsing and translation decisions, our system relies heavily on context, as encoded in currently 205 features de…
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation(语言、认知与计算研究所);School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学信息学院)
Localizing a semantic parser to support new languages requires effective cross-lingual generalization. Recent work has found success with machine-translation or zero-shot methods although these approaches can struggle to model how native speakers ask questions. We consider how to effectively leverage minimal annotated examples in new languages for few-shot cross-lingual semantic parsing. We introduce a first-order meta-learning algorithm to train a semantic parser with maximal sample efficiency during cross-lingual transfer. Our algorithm uses high-resource languages to train the parser and si…
This paper tackles the challenging problem of automating code updates to fix deprecated API usages of open source libraries by analyzing their release notes. Our system employs a three-tier architecture: first, a web crawler service retrieves deprecation documentation from the web; then a specially built parser processes those text documents into tree-structured representations; finally, a client IDE plugin locates and fixes identified deprecated usages of libraries in a given codebase. The focus of this paper in particular is the parsing component. We introduce a novel transition-based parser…
This paper describes our work on parsing Turkish using the lexical-functional grammar formalism. This work represents the first significant effort for parsing Turkish. Our implementation is based on Tomita's parser developed at Carnegie-Mellon University Center for Machine Translation. The grammar covers a substantial subset of Turkish including simple and complex sentences, and deals with a reasonable amount of word order freeness. The complex agglutinative morphology of Turkish lexical structures is handled using a separate two-level morphological analyzer. After a discussion of key relevant…
Machine translation tools do not yet exist for the Yup'ik language, a polysynthetic language spoken by around 8,000 people who live primarily in Southwest Alaska. We compiled a parallel text corpus for Yup'ik and English and developed a morphological parser for Yup'ik based on grammar rules. We trained a seq2seq neural machine translation model with attention to translate Yup'ik input into English. We then compared the influence of different tokenization methods, namely rule-based, unsupervised (byte pair encoding), and unsupervised morphological (Morfessor) parsing, on BLEU score accuracy for…
Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学);Karlsruhe Institute of Technology(卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院);LIMSI/CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay(巴黎萨克雷大学LIMSI/法国国家科学研究中心);University of Pennsylvania(宾夕法尼亚大学);ENS/CNRS/EHESS/INRIA(巴黎高等师范学院/法国国家科学研究中心/巴黎高等经济社会学院/法国国家信息与自动化研究所);University of Illinois(伊利诺伊大学)
This paper describes XNMT, the eXtensible Neural Machine Translation toolkit. XNMT distin- guishes itself from other open-source NMT toolkits by its focus on modular code design, with the purpose of enabling fast iteration in research and replicable, reliable results. In this paper we describe the design of XNMT and its experiment configuration system, and demonstrate its utility on the tasks of machine translation, speech recognition, and multi-tasked machine translation/parsing. XNMT is available open-source at https://github.com/neulab/xnmt
Multilingual machine translation enables a single model to translate between different languages. Most existing multilingual machine translation systems adopt a randomly initialized Transformer backbone. In this work, inspired by the recent success of language model pre-training, we present XLM-T, which initializes the model with an off-the-shelf pretrained cross-lingual Transformer encoder and fine-tunes it with multilingual parallel data. This simple method achieves significant improvements on a WMT dataset with 10 language pairs and the OPUS-100 corpus with 94 pairs. Surprisingly, the metho…
Stack Long Short-Term Memory (StackLSTM) is useful for various applications such as parsing and string-to-tree neural machine translation, but it is also known to be notoriously difficult to parallelize for GPU training due to the fact that the computations are dependent on discrete operations. In this paper, we tackle this problem by utilizing state access patterns of StackLSTM to homogenize computations with regard to different discrete operations. Our parsing experiments show that the method scales up almost linearly with increasing batch size, and our parallelized PyTorch implementation tr…
A generation algorithm based on an active chart parsing algorithm is introduced which can be used in conjunction with a Shake and Bake machine translation system. A concise Prolog implementation of the algorithm is provided, and some performance comparisons with a shift-reduce based algorithm are given which show the chart generator is much more efficient for generating all possible sentences from an input specification.
University of Southern California(南加州大学);University of Washington(华盛顿大学)
Most statistical machine translation systems cannot translate words that are unseen in the training data. However, humans can translate many classes of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words (e.g., novel morphological variants, misspellings, and compounds) without context by using orthographic clues. Following this observation, we describe and evaluate several general methods for OOV translation that use only subword information. We pose the OOV translation problem as a standalone task and intrinsically evaluate our approaches on fourteen typologically diverse languages across varying resource levels. …
University of Groningen(格罗宁根大学);École Normale Supérieure de Cachan(卡尚高等师范学院);University of Trento(特伦托大学)
The Parallel Meaning Bank is a corpus of translations annotated with shared, formal meaning representations comprising over 11 million words divided over four languages (English, German, Italian, and Dutch). Our approach is based on cross-lingual projection: automatically produced (and manually corrected) semantic annotations for English sentences are mapped onto their word-aligned translations, assuming that the translations are meaning-preserving. The semantic annotation consists of five main steps: (i) segmentation of the text in sentences and lexical items; (ii) syntactic parsing with Comb…
The interest in statistical machine translation systems increases currently due to political and social events in the world. A proposed Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) based model that can be used to translate a sentence from the source Language (English) to the target language (Arabic) automatically through efficiently incorporating different statistical and Natural Language Processing (NLP) models such as language model, alignment model, phrase based model, reordering model, and translation model. These models are combined to enhance the performance of statistical machine translation (…
Machine Translation is one of the major oldest and the most active research area in Natural Language Processing. Currently, Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) dominates the Machine Translation research. Statistical Machine Translation is an approach to Machine Translation which uses models to learn translation patterns directly from data, and generalize them to translate a new unseen text. The SMT approach is largely language independent, i.e. the models can be applied to any language pair. Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) attempts to generate translations using statistical methods bas…
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology(国立信息通信技术研究所)
Recent work achieved remarkable results in training neural machine translation (NMT) systems in a fully unsupervised way, with new and dedicated architectures that rely on monolingual corpora only. In this work, we propose to define unsupervised NMT (UNMT) as NMT trained with the supervision of synthetic bilingual data. Our approach straightforwardly enables the use of state-of-the-art architectures proposed for supervised NMT by replacing human-made bilingual data with synthetic bilingual data for training. We propose to initialize the training of UNMT with synthetic bilingual data generated …
A crowdsourcing translation approach is an effective tool for globalization of site content, but it is also an important source of parallel linguistic data. For the given site, processed with a crowdsourcing system, a sentence-aligned corpus can be fetched, which covers a very narrow domain of terminology and language patterns - a site-specific domain. These data can be used for training and estimation of site-specific statistical machine translation engine
Sequence to sequence learning has recently emerged as a new paradigm in supervised learning. To date, most of its applications focused on only one task and not much work explored this framework for multiple tasks. This paper examines three multi-task learning (MTL) settings for sequence to sequence models: (a) the oneto-many setting - where the encoder is shared between several tasks such as machine translation and syntactic parsing, (b) the many-to-one setting - useful when only the decoder can be shared, as in the case of translation and image caption generation, and (c) the many-to-many set…
Microsoft(微软);University of Pennsylvania(宾夕法尼亚大学);Boston University(波士顿大学)
We present a simple but effective approach for leveraging Wikipedia for neural machine translation as well as cross-lingual tasks of image captioning and dependency parsing without using any direct supervision from external parallel data or supervised models in the target language. We show that first sentences and titles of linked Wikipedia pages, as well as cross-lingual image captions, are strong signals for a seed parallel data to extract bilingual dictionaries and cross-lingual word embeddings for mining parallel text from Wikipedia. Our final model achieves high BLEU scores that are close…
PRHLT Research Center(PRHLT研究中心);Universitat Politècnica de València(瓦伦西亚理工大学)
We address the data selection problem in statistical machine translation (SMT) as a classification task. The new data selection method is based on a neural network classifier. We present a new method description and empirical results proving that our data selection method provides better translation quality, compared to a state-of-the-art method (i.e., Cross entropy). Moreover, the empirical results reported are coherent across different language pairs.
This paper presents the NICT's participation to the WMT18 shared news translation task. We participated in the eight translation directions of four language pairs: Estonian-English, Finnish-English, Turkish-English and Chinese-English. For each translation direction, we prepared state-of-the-art statistical (SMT) and neural (NMT) machine translation systems. Our NMT systems were trained with the transformer architecture using the provided parallel data enlarged with a large quantity of back-translated monolingual data that we generated with a new incremental training framework. Our primary sub…
In this paper, we investigate the use of linguistically motivated and computationally efficient structured language models for reranking N-best hypotheses in a statistical machine translation system. These language models, developed from Constraint Dependency Grammar parses, tightly integrate knowledge of words, morphological and lexical features, and syntactic dependency constraints. Two structured language models are applied for N-best rescoring, one is an almost-parsing language model, and the other utilizes more syntactic features by explicitly modeling syntactic dependencies between words…
Rule-based machine translation is more data efficient than the big data-based machine translation approaches, making it appropriate for languages with low bilingual corpus resources -- i.e., minority languages. However, the rule-based approach has declined in popularity relative to its big data cousins primarily because of the extensive training and labour required to define the language rules. To address this, we present a semantic representation that 1) treats all bits of meaning as individual concepts that 2) modify or further specify one another to build a network that relates entities in …
National University of Singapore(新加坡国立大学);Tsinghua University(清华大学)
Reordering poses a major challenge in machine translation (MT) between two languages with significant differences in word order. In this paper, we present a novel reordering approach utilizing sparse features based on dependency word pairs. Each instance of these features captures whether two words, which are related by a dependency link in the source sentence dependency parse tree, follow the same order or are swapped in the translation output. Experiments on Chinese-to-English translation show a statistically significant improvement of 1.21 BLEU point using our approach, compared to a state-…
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is a new approach to machine translation that has made great progress in recent years. However, recent studies show that NMT generally produces fluent but inadequate translations (Tu et al. 2016b; Tu et al. 2016a; He et al. 2016; Tu et al. 2017). This is in contrast to conventional Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), which usually yields adequate but non-fluent translations. It is natural, therefore, to leverage the advantages of both models for better translations, and in this work we propose to incorporate SMT model into NMT framework. More specifically, a…
University of Washington(华盛顿大学);SRI International(SRI国际研究所);LinkedIn(领英)
Statistical machine translation for dialectal Arabic is characterized by a lack of data since data acquisition involves the transcription and translation of spoken language. In this study we develop techniques for extracting parallel data for one particular dialect of Arabic (Iraqi Arabic) from out-of-domain corpora in different dialects of Arabic or in Modern Standard Arabic. We compare two different data selection strategies (cross-entropy based and submodular selection) and demonstrate that a very small but highly targeted amount of found data can improve the performance of a baseline machi…
Research Lab. UTIC, University of Tunis(突尼斯大学UTIC研究实验室)
This works aims to design a statistical machine translation from English text to American Sign Language (ASL). The system is based on Moses tool with some modifications and the results are synthesized through a 3D avatar for interpretation. First, we translate the input text to gloss, a written form of ASL. Second, we pass the output to the WebSign Plug-in to play the sign. Contributions of this work are the use of a new couple of language English/ASL and an improvement of statistical machine translation based on string matching thanks to Jaro-distance.
In this paper, we discuss different methods which use meta information and richer context that may accompany source language input to improve machine translation quality. We focus on category information of input text as meta information, but the proposed methods can be extended to all textual and non-textual meta information that might be available for the input text or automatically predicted using the text content. The main novelty of this work is to use state-of-the-art neural network methods to tackle this problem within a statistical machine translation (SMT) framework. We observe transl…
This paper discusses Centre for Development of Advanced Computing Mumbai's (CDACM) submission to the NLP Tools Contest on Statistical Machine Translation in Indian Languages (ILSMT) 2014 (collocated with ICON 2014). The objective of the contest was to explore the effectiveness of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) for Indian language to Indian language and English-Hindi machine translation. In this paper, we have proposed that suffix separation and word splitting for SMT from agglutinative languages to Hindi significantly improves over the baseline (BL). We have also shown that the factored…
I started this work with the hope of generating a text synthesizer (like a musical synthesizer) that can imitate certain linguistic styles. Most of the report focuses on text simplification using statistical machine translation (SMT) techniques. I applied MOSES to a parallel corpus of the Bible (King James Version and Easy-to-Read Version) and that of Wikipedia articles (normal and simplified). I report the importance of the three main components of SMT---phrase translation, language model, and recording---by changing their weights and comparing the resulting quality of simplified text in term…
An increasingly wide range of artificial intelligence applications rely on syntactic information to process and extract meaning from natural language text or speech, with constituent trees being one of the most widely used syntactic formalisms. To produce these phrase-structure representations from sentences in natural language, shift-reduce constituent parsers have become one of the most efficient approaches. Increasing their accuracy and speed is still one of the main objectives pursued by the research community so that artificial intelligence applications that make use of parsing outputs, s…
LMU Munich(慕尼黑大学);Charles University in Prague(布拉格查理大学);Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań(波兹南亚当·密茨凯维奇大学)
Discriminative translation models utilizing source context have been shown to help statistical machine translation performance. We propose a novel extension of this work using target context information. Surprisingly, we show that this model can be efficiently integrated directly in the decoding process. Our approach scales to large training data sizes and results in consistent improvements in translation quality on four language pairs. We also provide an analysis comparing the strengths of the baseline source-context model with our extended source-context and target-context model and we show …
In machine translation (MT) that involves translating between two languages with significant differences in word order, determining the correct word order of translated words is a major challenge. The dependency parse tree of a source sentence can help to determine the correct word order of the translated words. In this paper, we present a novel reordering approach utilizing a neural network and dependency-based embeddings to predict whether the translations of two source words linked by a dependency relation should remain in the same order or should be swapped in the translated sentence. Expe…
New York University Abu Dhabi(纽约大学阿布扎比分校);Element AI
Neural networks have become the state-of-the-art approach for machine translation (MT) in many languages. While linguistically-motivated tokenization techniques were shown to have significant effects on the performance of statistical MT, it remains unclear if those techniques are well suited for neural MT. In this paper, we systematically compare neural and statistical MT models for Arabic-English translation on data preprecossed by various prominent tokenization schemes. Furthermore, we consider a range of data and vocabulary sizes and compare their effect on both approaches. Our empirical re…