# Learning to Parse and Translate Improves Neural Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.03525 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03525/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Multilingual Multimodal Pre-training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08849/) (2021)
- [Transformer Grammars: Augmenting Transformer Language Models with Syntactic Inductive Biases at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00633/) (2022)
- [Improving Multilingual Translation by Representation and Gradient Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04778/) (2021)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Learning with Latent Neural Grammars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01135/) (2021)
- [Effective Batching for Recurrent Neural Network Grammars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14822/) (2021)
- [Explicit Syntactic Guidance for Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11485/) (2023)
- [Rule Augmented Unsupervised Constituency Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10193/) (2021)
- [Does Entity Abstraction Help Generative Transformers Reason?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01787/) (2022)
- [Dense but Efficient VideoQA for Intricate Compositional Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10300/) (2022)
- [Context-Aware Machine Translation with Source Coreference Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19505/) (2024)
- [Enhancing the Transformer Decoder with Transition-based Syntax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12640/) (2021)
- [CUNI systems for WMT21: Multilingual Low-Resource Translation for Indo-European Languages Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09354/) (2021)
- [Deps-SAN: Neural Machine Translation with Dependency-Scaled Self-Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11707/) (2021)
- [Visualizing the Relationship Between Encoded Linguistic Information and Task Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15860/) (2022)
- [The ART of Composition: Attention-Regularized Training for Compositional Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08110/) (2024)
- [Top-down string-to-dependency Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27938/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There has been relatively little attention to incorporating linguistic prior to neural machine translation. Much of the previous work was further constrained to considering linguistic prior on the source side. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model, called NMT+RNNG, that learns to parse and translate by combining the recurrent neural network grammar into the attention-based neural machine translation. Our approach encourages the neural machine translation model to incorporate linguistic prior during training, and lets it translate on its own afterward. Extensive experiments with four language pairs show the effectiveness of the proposed NMT+RNNG.