THUMT: An Open Source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation

Contents

• Introduction
• Online Demo
• Implementations
• Notable Features
• Documentation
• License
• Citation
• Development Team
• Contact
• Derivative Repositories

Introduction

Machine translation is a natural language processing task that aims to translate natural languages using computers automatically. Recent several years have witnessed the rapid development of end-to-end neural machine translation, which has become the new mainstream method in practical MT systems.

THUMT is an open-source toolkit for neural machine translation developed by the Natural Language Processing Group at Tsinghua University. The website of THUMT is: http://thumt.thunlp.org/.

Online Demo

The online demo of THUMT is available at http://translate.thumt.cn/. The languages involved include Ancient Chinese, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Implementations

THUMT has currently three main implementations:

• THUMT-PyTorch: a new implementation developed with PyTorch. It implements the Transformer model (Transformer) (Vaswani et al., 2017).

• THUMT-TensorFlow: an implementation developed with TensorFlow. It implements the sequence-to-sequence model (Seq2Seq) (Sutskever et al., 2014), the standard attention-based model (RNNsearch) (Bahdanau et al., 2014), and the Transformer model (Transformer) (Vaswani et al., 2017).

• THUMT-Theano: the original project developed with Theano, which is no longer updated because MLA put an end to Theano. It implements the standard attention-based model (RNNsearch) (Bahdanau et al., 2014), minimum risk training (MRT) (Shen et al., 2016) for optimizing model parameters with respect to evaluation metrics, semi-supervised training (SST) (Cheng et al., 2016) for exploiting monolingual corpora to learn bi-directional translation models, and layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) (Ding et al., 2017) for visualizing and anlayzing RNNsearch.

The following table summarizes the features of three implementations:

Implementation	Model	Criterion	Optimizer	LRP
Theano	RNNsearch	MLE, MRT, SST	SGD, AdaDelta, Adam	RNNsearch
TensorFlow	Seq2Seq, RNNsearch, Transformer	MLE	Adam	RNNsearch, Transformer
PyTorch	Transformer	MLE	SGD, Adadelta, Adam	N.A.

We recommend using THUMT-PyTorch or THUMT-TensorFlow, which delivers better translation performance than THUMT-Theano. We will keep adding new features to THUMT-PyTorch and THUMT-TensorFlow.

Notable Features

• Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017)
• Multi-GPU training & decoding
• Multi-worker distributed training
• Mixed precision training & decoding
• Model ensemble & averaging
• Gradient aggregation
• TensorBoard for visualization

Documentation

The documentation of PyTorch implementation is avaiable at here.

License

The source code is dual licensed. Open source licensing is under the BSD-3-Clause, which allows free use for research purposes. For commercial licensing, please email [email protected].

Citation

Please cite the following paper:

Zhixing Tan, Jiacheng Zhang, Xuancheng Huang, Gang Chen, Shuo Wang, Maosong Sun, Huanbo Luan, Yang Liu. THUMT: An Open Source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation. AMTA 2020.

Jiacheng Zhang, Yanzhuo Ding, Shiqi Shen, Yong Cheng, Maosong Sun, Huanbo Luan, Yang Liu. 2017. THUMT: An Open Source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation. arXiv:1706.06415.

Development Team

Project leaders: Maosong Sun, Yang Liu, Huanbo Luan

Project members:

Theano: Jiacheng Zhang, Yanzhuo Ding, Shiqi Shen, Yong Cheng

TensorFlow: Zhixing Tan, Jiacheng Zhang, Xuancheng Huang, Gang Chen, Shuo Wang, Zonghan Yang

PyTorch: Zhixing Tan, Gang Chen

Contact

If you have questions, suggestions and bug reports, please email [email protected].

Derivative Repositories

• UCE4BT (Improving Back-Translation with Uncertainty-based Confidence Estimation)
• L2Copy4APE (Learning to Copy for Automatic Post-Editing)
• Document-Transformer (Improving the Transformer Translation Model with Document-Level Context)
• PR4NMT (Prior Knowledge Integration for Neural Machine Translation using Posterior Regularization)