# Inducing Grammars with and for Neural Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.10850 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10850/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [On the Difficulty of Translating Free-Order Case-Marking Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06055/) (2021)
- [Learning with Latent Structures in Natural Language Processing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00490/) (2022)
- [SynJax: Structured Probability Distributions for JAX](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03291/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine translation systems require semantic knowledge and grammatical understanding. Neural machine translation (NMT) systems often assume this information is captured by an attention mechanism and a decoder that ensures fluency. Recent work has shown that incorporating explicit syntax alleviates the burden of modeling both types of knowledge. However, requiring parses is expensive and does not explore the question of what syntax a model needs during translation. To address both of these issues we introduce a model that simultaneously translates while inducing dependency trees. In this way, we leverage the benefits of structure while investigating what syntax NMT must induce to maximize performance. We show that our dependency trees are 1. language pair dependent and 2. improve translation quality.