Sequence Shortening for Context-Aware Machine Translation

Context-aware Machine Translation aims to improve translations of sentences by incorporating surrounding sentences as context. Towards this task, two main architectures have been applied, namely single-encoder (based on concatenation) and multi-encoder models. In this study, we show that a special case of multi-encoder architecture, where the latent representation of the source sentence is cached and reused as the context in the next step, achieves higher accuracy on the contrastive datasets (where the models have to rank the correct translation among the provided sentences) and comparable BLEU and COMET scores as the single- and multi-encoder approaches. Furthermore, we investigate the application of Sequence Shortening to the cached representations. We test three pooling-based shortening techniques and introduce two novel methods - Latent Grouping and Latent Selecting, where the network learns to group tokens or selects the tokens to be cached as context. Our experiments show that the two methods achieve competitive BLEU and COMET scores and accuracies on the contrastive datasets to the other tested methods while potentially allowing for higher interpretability and reducing the growth of memory requirements with increased context size.

TENT: Tensorized Encoder Transformer for Temperature Forecasting

Reliable weather forecasting is of great importance in science, business and society. The best performing data-driven models for weather prediction tasks rely on recurrent or convolutional neural networks, where some of which incorporate attention mechanisms. In this work, we introduce a new model based on the Transformer architecture for weather forecasting. The proposed Tensorial Encoder Transformer (TENT) model is equipped with tensorial attention and thus it exploits the spatiotemporal structure of weather data by processing it in multidimensional tensorial format. We show that compared to the encoder part of the original transformer and 3D convolutional neural networks, the proposed TENT model can better model the underlying complex pattern of weather data for the studied temperature prediction task. Experiments on two real-life weather datasets are performed. The datasets consist of historical measurements from USA, Canada and European cities. The first dataset contains hourly measurements of weather attributes for 30 cities in USA and Canada from October 2012 to November 2017. The second dataset contains daily measurements of weather attributes of 18 cities across Europe from May 2005 to April 2020. We use attention scores calculated from our attention mechanism to shed light on the decision-making process of our model and have insight knowledge on the most important cities for the task.