Revisiting the Markov Property for Machine Translation
Cunxiao Du, Hao Zhou, Zhaopeng Tu, Jing Jiang
TL;DR
It is indicated that MAT with an order larger than 4 can generate translations with quality on par with that of conventional autoregressive transformers.
Abstract
In this paper, we re-examine the Markov property in the context of neural machine translation. We design a Markov Autoregressive Transformer~(MAT) and undertake a comprehensive assessment of its performance across four WMT benchmarks. Our findings indicate that MAT with an order larger than 4 can generate translations with quality on par with that of conventional autoregressive transformers. In addition, counter-intuitively, we also find that the advantages of utilizing a higher-order MAT do not specifically contribute to the translation of longer sentences.