Character-level Chinese-English Translation through ASCII Encoding

Understand

Character-level Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have recently achieved impressive results on many language pairs.

• They mainly do well for Indo-European language pairs, where the languages share the same writing system.
• However, for translating between Chinese and English, the gap between the two different writing systems poses a major challenge because of a lack of systematic correspondence between the individual linguistic units.
• In this paper, we enable character-level NMT for Chinese, by breaking down Chinese characters into linguistic units similar to that of Indo-European languages.