10.5. Machine Translation and the Dataset
Open the notebook in Colab
Open the notebook in Colab
Open the notebook in Colab
Open the notebook in Colab
Open the notebook in SageMaker Studio Lab

Among the major breakthroughs that prompted widespread interest in modern RNNs was a major advance in the applied field of statistical machine translation. Here, the model is presented with a sentence in one language and must predict the corresponding sentence in another. Note that here the sentences may be of different lengths, and that corresponding words in the two sentences may not occur in the same order, owing to differences in the two language’s grammatical structure.

Many problems have this flavor of mapping between two such “unaligned” sequences. Examples include mapping from dialog prompts to replies or from questions to answers. Broadly, such problems are called sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) problems and they are our focus for both the remainder of this chapter and much of Section 11.

In this section, we introduce the machine translation problem and an example dataset that we will use in the subsequent examples. For decades, statistical formulations of translation between languages had been popular (Brown et al., 1990, Brown et al., 1988), even before researchers got neural network approaches working (methods were often lumped together under the term neural machine translation).

First we will need some new code to process our data. Unlike the language modeling that we saw in Section 9.3, here each example consists of two separate text sequences, one in the source language and another (the translation) in the target language. The following code snippets will show how to load the preprocessed data into minibatches for training.

import os
import torch
from d2l import torch as d2l
import os
from mxnet import np, npx
from d2l import mxnet as d2l

npx.set_np()
import os
from jax import numpy as jnp
from d2l import jax as d2l
No GPU/TPU found, falling back to CPU. (Set TF_CPP_MIN_LOG_LEVEL=0 and rerun for more info.)
import os
import tensorflow as tf
from d2l import tensorflow as d2l

10.5.1. Downloading and Preprocessing the Dataset

To begin, we download an English–French dataset that consists of bilingual sentence pairs from the Tatoeba Project. Each line in the dataset is a tab-delimited pair consisting of an English text sequence (the source) and the translated French text sequence (the target). Note that each text sequence can be just one sentence, or a paragraph of multiple sentences.

class MTFraEng(d2l.DataModule):  #@save
    """The English-French dataset."""
    def _download(self):
        d2l.extract(d2l.download(
            d2l.DATA_URL+'fra-eng.zip', self.root,
            '94646ad1522d915e7b0f9296181140edcf86a4f5'))
        with open(self.root + '/fra-eng/fra.txt', encoding='utf-8') as f:
            return f.read()

data = MTFraEng()
raw_text = data._download()
print(raw_text[:75])
Downloading ../data/fra-eng.zip from http://d2l-data.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/fra-eng.zip...
Go. Va !
Hi. Salut !
Run!        Cours !
Run!        Courez !
Who?        Qui ?
Wow!        Ça alors !
class MTFraEng(d2l.DataModule):  #@save
    """The English-French dataset."""
    def _download(self):
        d2l.extract(d2l.download(
            d2l.DATA_URL+'fra-eng.zip', self.root,
            '94646ad1522d915e7b0f9296181140edcf86a4f5'))
        with open(self.root + '/fra-eng/fra.txt', encoding='utf-8') as f:
            return f.read()

data = MTFraEng()
raw_text = data._download()
print(raw_text[:75])
Downloading ../data/fra-eng.zip from http://d2l-data.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/fra-eng.zip...
Go. Va !
Hi. Salut !
Run!        Cours !
Run!        Courez !
Who?        Qui ?
Wow!        Ça alors !
class MTFraEng(d2l.DataModule):  #@save
    """The English-French dataset."""
    def _download(self):
        d2l.extract(d2l.download(
            d2l.DATA_URL+'fra-eng.zip', self.root,
            '94646ad1522d915e7b0f9296181140edcf86a4f5'))
        with open(self.root + '/fra-eng/fra.txt', encoding='utf-8') as f:
            return f.read()

data = MTFraEng()
raw_text = data._download()
print(raw_text[:75])
Go. Va !
Hi. Salut !
Run!        Cours !
Run!        Courez !
Who?        Qui ?
Wow!        Ça alors !
class MTFraEng(d2l.DataModule):  #@save
    """The English-French dataset."""
    def _download(self):
        d2l.extract(d2l.download(
            d2l.DATA_URL+'fra-eng.zip', self.root,
            '94646ad1522d915e7b0f9296181140edcf86a4f5'))
        with open(self.root + '/fra-eng/fra.txt', encoding='utf-8') as f:
            return f.read()

data = MTFraEng()
raw_text = data._download()
print(raw_text[:75])
Go. Va !
Hi. Salut !
Run!        Cours !
Run!        Courez !
Who?        Qui ?
Wow!        Ça alors !

After downloading the dataset, we proceed with several preprocessing steps for the raw text data. For instance, we replace non-breaking space with space, convert uppercase letters to lowercase ones, and insert space between words and punctuation marks.

@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def _preprocess(self, text):
    # Replace non-breaking space with space
    text = text.replace('\u202f', ' ').replace('\xa0', ' ')
    # Insert space between words and punctuation marks
    no_space = lambda char, prev_char: char in ',.!?' and prev_char != ' '
    out = [' ' + char if i > 0 and no_space(char, text[i - 1]) else char
           for i, char in enumerate(text.lower())]
    return ''.join(out)

text = data._preprocess(raw_text)
print(text[:80])
go .        va !
hi .        salut !
run !       cours !
run !       courez !
who ?       qui ?
wow !       ça alors !
@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def _preprocess(self, text):
    # Replace non-breaking space with space
    text = text.replace('\u202f', ' ').replace('\xa0', ' ')
    # Insert space between words and punctuation marks
    no_space = lambda char, prev_char: char in ',.!?' and prev_char != ' '
    out = [' ' + char if i > 0 and no_space(char, text[i - 1]) else char
           for i, char in enumerate(text.lower())]
    return ''.join(out)

text = data._preprocess(raw_text)
print(text[:80])
go .        va !
hi .        salut !
run !       cours !
run !       courez !
who ?       qui ?
wow !       ça alors !
@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def _preprocess(self, text):
    # Replace non-breaking space with space
    text = text.replace('\u202f', ' ').replace('\xa0', ' ')
    # Insert space between words and punctuation marks
    no_space = lambda char, prev_char: char in ',.!?' and prev_char != ' '
    out = [' ' + char if i > 0 and no_space(char, text[i - 1]) else char
           for i, char in enumerate(text.lower())]
    return ''.join(out)

text = data._preprocess(raw_text)
print(text[:80])
go .        va !
hi .        salut !
run !       cours !
run !       courez !
who ?       qui ?
wow !       ça alors !
@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def _preprocess(self, text):
    # Replace non-breaking space with space
    text = text.replace('\u202f', ' ').replace('\xa0', ' ')
    # Insert space between words and punctuation marks
    no_space = lambda char, prev_char: char in ',.!?' and prev_char != ' '
    out = [' ' + char if i > 0 and no_space(char, text[i - 1]) else char
           for i, char in enumerate(text.lower())]
    return ''.join(out)

text = data._preprocess(raw_text)
print(text[:80])
go .        va !
hi .        salut !
run !       cours !
run !       courez !
who ?       qui ?
wow !       ça alors !

10.5.2. Tokenization

Unlike the character-level tokenization in Section 9.3, for machine translation we prefer word-level tokenization here (today’s state-of-the-art models use more complex tokenization techniques). The following _tokenize method tokenizes the first max_examples text sequence pairs, where each token is either a word or a punctuation mark. We append the special “<eos>” token to the end of every sequence to indicate the end of the sequence. When a model is predicting by generating a sequence token after token, the generation of the “<eos>” token can suggest that the output sequence is complete. In the end, the method below returns two lists of token lists: src and tgt. Specifically, src[i] is a list of tokens from the \(i^\textrm{th}\) text sequence in the source language (English here) and tgt[i] is that in the target language (French here).

@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def _tokenize(self, text, max_examples=None):
    src, tgt = [], []
    for i, line in enumerate(text.split('\n')):
        if max_examples and i > max_examples: break
        parts = line.split('\t')
        if len(parts) == 2:
            # Skip empty tokens
            src.append([t for t in f'{parts[0]} <eos>'.split(' ') if t])
            tgt.append([t for t in f'{parts[1]} <eos>'.split(' ') if t])
    return src, tgt

src, tgt = data._tokenize(text)
src[:6], tgt[:6]
([['go', '.', '<eos>'],
  ['hi', '.', '<eos>'],
  ['run', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['run', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['who', '?', '<eos>'],
  ['wow', '!', '<eos>']],
 [['va', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['salut', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['cours', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['courez', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['qui', '?', '<eos>'],
  ['ça', 'alors', '!', '<eos>']])
@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def _tokenize(self, text, max_examples=None):
    src, tgt = [], []
    for i, line in enumerate(text.split('\n')):
        if max_examples and i > max_examples: break
        parts = line.split('\t')
        if len(parts) == 2:
            # Skip empty tokens
            src.append([t for t in f'{parts[0]} <eos>'.split(' ') if t])
            tgt.append([t for t in f'{parts[1]} <eos>'.split(' ') if t])
    return src, tgt

src, tgt = data._tokenize(text)
src[:6], tgt[:6]
([['go', '.', '<eos>'],
  ['hi', '.', '<eos>'],
  ['run', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['run', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['who', '?', '<eos>'],
  ['wow', '!', '<eos>']],
 [['va', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['salut', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['cours', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['courez', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['qui', '?', '<eos>'],
  ['ça', 'alors', '!', '<eos>']])
@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def _tokenize(self, text, max_examples=None):
    src, tgt = [], []
    for i, line in enumerate(text.split('\n')):
        if max_examples and i > max_examples: break
        parts = line.split('\t')
        if len(parts) == 2:
            # Skip empty tokens
            src.append([t for t in f'{parts[0]} <eos>'.split(' ') if t])
            tgt.append([t for t in f'{parts[1]} <eos>'.split(' ') if t])
    return src, tgt

src, tgt = data._tokenize(text)
src[:6], tgt[:6]
([['go', '.', '<eos>'],
  ['hi', '.', '<eos>'],
  ['run', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['run', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['who', '?', '<eos>'],
  ['wow', '!', '<eos>']],
 [['va', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['salut', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['cours', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['courez', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['qui', '?', '<eos>'],
  ['ça', 'alors', '!', '<eos>']])
@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def _tokenize(self, text, max_examples=None):
    src, tgt = [], []
    for i, line in enumerate(text.split('\n')):
        if max_examples and i > max_examples: break
        parts = line.split('\t')
        if len(parts) == 2:
            # Skip empty tokens
            src.append([t for t in f'{parts[0]} <eos>'.split(' ') if t])
            tgt.append([t for t in f'{parts[1]} <eos>'.split(' ') if t])
    return src, tgt

src, tgt = data._tokenize(text)
src[:6], tgt[:6]
([['go', '.', '<eos>'],
  ['hi', '.', '<eos>'],
  ['run', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['run', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['who', '?', '<eos>'],
  ['wow', '!', '<eos>']],
 [['va', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['salut', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['cours', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['courez', '!', '<eos>'],
  ['qui', '?', '<eos>'],
  ['ça', 'alors', '!', '<eos>']])

Let’s plot the histogram of the number of tokens per text sequence. In this simple English–French dataset, most of the text sequences have fewer than 20 tokens.

#@save
def show_list_len_pair_hist(legend, xlabel, ylabel, xlist, ylist):
    """Plot the histogram for list length pairs."""
    d2l.set_figsize()
    _, _, patches = d2l.plt.hist(
        [[len(l) for l in xlist], [len(l) for l in ylist]])
    d2l.plt.xlabel(xlabel)
    d2l.plt.ylabel(ylabel)
    for patch in patches[1].patches:
        patch.set_hatch('/')
    d2l.plt.legend(legend)

show_list_len_pair_hist(['source', 'target'], '# tokens per sequence',
                        'count', src, tgt);
../_images/output_machine-translation-and-dataset_887557_63_0.svg
#@save
def show_list_len_pair_hist(legend, xlabel, ylabel, xlist, ylist):
    """Plot the histogram for list length pairs."""
    d2l.set_figsize()
    _, _, patches = d2l.plt.hist(
        [[len(l) for l in xlist], [len(l) for l in ylist]])
    d2l.plt.xlabel(xlabel)
    d2l.plt.ylabel(ylabel)
    for patch in patches[1].patches:
        patch.set_hatch('/')
    d2l.plt.legend(legend)

show_list_len_pair_hist(['source', 'target'], '# tokens per sequence',
                        'count', src, tgt);
../_images/output_machine-translation-and-dataset_887557_66_0.svg
#@save
def show_list_len_pair_hist(legend, xlabel, ylabel, xlist, ylist):
    """Plot the histogram for list length pairs."""
    d2l.set_figsize()
    _, _, patches = d2l.plt.hist(
        [[len(l) for l in xlist], [len(l) for l in ylist]])
    d2l.plt.xlabel(xlabel)
    d2l.plt.ylabel(ylabel)
    for patch in patches[1].patches:
        patch.set_hatch('/')
    d2l.plt.legend(legend)

show_list_len_pair_hist(['source', 'target'], '# tokens per sequence',
                        'count', src, tgt);
../_images/output_machine-translation-and-dataset_887557_69_0.svg
#@save
def show_list_len_pair_hist(legend, xlabel, ylabel, xlist, ylist):
    """Plot the histogram for list length pairs."""
    d2l.set_figsize()
    _, _, patches = d2l.plt.hist(
        [[len(l) for l in xlist], [len(l) for l in ylist]])
    d2l.plt.xlabel(xlabel)
    d2l.plt.ylabel(ylabel)
    for patch in patches[1].patches:
        patch.set_hatch('/')
    d2l.plt.legend(legend)

show_list_len_pair_hist(['source', 'target'], '# tokens per sequence',
                        'count', src, tgt);
../_images/output_machine-translation-and-dataset_887557_72_0.svg

10.5.3. Loading Sequences of Fixed Length

Recall that in language modeling each example sequence, either a segment of one sentence or a span over multiple sentences, had a fixed length. This was specified by the num_steps (number of time steps or tokens) argument from Section 9.3. In machine translation, each example is a pair of source and target text sequences, where the two text sequences may have different lengths.

For computational efficiency, we can still process a minibatch of text sequences at one time by truncation and padding. Suppose that every sequence in the same minibatch should have the same length num_steps. If a text sequence has fewer than num_steps tokens, we will keep appending the special “<pad>” token to its end until its length reaches num_steps. Otherwise, we will truncate the text sequence by only taking its first num_steps tokens and discarding the remaining. In this way, every text sequence will have the same length to be loaded in minibatches of the same shape. Furthermore, we also record length of the source sequence excluding padding tokens. This information will be needed by some models that we will cover later.

Since the machine translation dataset consists of pairs of languages, we can build two vocabularies for both the source language and the target language separately. With word-level tokenization, the vocabulary size will be significantly larger than that using character-level tokenization. To alleviate this, here we treat infrequent tokens that appear less than twice as the same unknown (“<unk>”) token. As we will explain later (Fig. 10.7.1), when training with target sequences, the decoder output (label tokens) can be the same decoder input (target tokens), shifted by one token; and the special beginning-of-sequence “<bos>” token will be used as the first input token for predicting the target sequence (Fig. 10.7.3).

@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def __init__(self, batch_size, num_steps=9, num_train=512, num_val=128):
    super(MTFraEng, self).__init__()
    self.save_hyperparameters()
    self.arrays, self.src_vocab, self.tgt_vocab = self._build_arrays(
        self._download())

@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def _build_arrays(self, raw_text, src_vocab=None, tgt_vocab=None):
    def _build_array(sentences, vocab, is_tgt=False):
        pad_or_trim = lambda seq, t: (
            seq[:t] if len(seq) > t else seq + ['<pad>'] * (t - len(seq)))
        sentences = [pad_or_trim(s, self.num_steps) for s in sentences]
        if is_tgt:
            sentences = [['<bos>'] + s for s in sentences]
        if vocab is None:
            vocab = d2l.Vocab(sentences, min_freq=2)
        array = torch.tensor([vocab[s] for s in sentences])
        valid_len = (array != vocab['<pad>']).type(torch.int32).sum(1)
        return array, vocab, valid_len
    src, tgt = self._tokenize(self._preprocess(raw_text),
                              self.num_train + self.num_val)
    src_array, src_vocab, src_valid_len = _build_array(src, src_vocab)
    tgt_array, tgt_vocab, _ = _build_array(tgt, tgt_vocab, True)
    return ((src_array, tgt_array[:,:-1], src_valid_len, tgt_array[:,1:]),
            src_vocab, tgt_vocab)
@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def __init__(self, batch_size, num_steps=9, num_train=512, num_val=128):
    super(MTFraEng, self).__init__()
    self.save_hyperparameters()
    self.arrays, self.src_vocab, self.tgt_vocab = self._build_arrays(
        self._download())

@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def _build_arrays(self, raw_text, src_vocab=None, tgt_vocab=None):
    def _build_array(sentences, vocab, is_tgt=False):
        pad_or_trim = lambda seq, t: (
            seq[:t] if len(seq) > t else seq + ['<pad>'] * (t - len(seq)))
        sentences = [pad_or_trim(s, self.num_steps) for s in sentences]
        if is_tgt:
            sentences = [['<bos>'] + s for s in sentences]
        if vocab is None:
            vocab = d2l.Vocab(sentences, min_freq=2)
        array = np.array([vocab[s] for s in sentences])
        valid_len = (array != vocab['<pad>']).astype(np.int32).sum(1)
        return array, vocab, valid_len
    src, tgt = self._tokenize(self._preprocess(raw_text),
                              self.num_train + self.num_val)
    src_array, src_vocab, src_valid_len = _build_array(src, src_vocab)
    tgt_array, tgt_vocab, _ = _build_array(tgt, tgt_vocab, True)
    return ((src_array, tgt_array[:,:-1], src_valid_len, tgt_array[:,1:]),
            src_vocab, tgt_vocab)
@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def __init__(self, batch_size, num_steps=9, num_train=512, num_val=128):
    super(MTFraEng, self).__init__()
    self.save_hyperparameters()
    self.arrays, self.src_vocab, self.tgt_vocab = self._build_arrays(
        self._download())

@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def _build_arrays(self, raw_text, src_vocab=None, tgt_vocab=None):
    def _build_array(sentences, vocab, is_tgt=False):
        pad_or_trim = lambda seq, t: (
            seq[:t] if len(seq) > t else seq + ['<pad>'] * (t - len(seq)))
        sentences = [pad_or_trim(s, self.num_steps) for s in sentences]
        if is_tgt:
            sentences = [['<bos>'] + s for s in sentences]
        if vocab is None:
            vocab = d2l.Vocab(sentences, min_freq=2)
        array = jnp.array([vocab[s] for s in sentences])
        valid_len = (array != vocab['<pad>']).astype(jnp.int32).sum(1)
        return array, vocab, valid_len
    src, tgt = self._tokenize(self._preprocess(raw_text),
                              self.num_train + self.num_val)
    src_array, src_vocab, src_valid_len = _build_array(src, src_vocab)
    tgt_array, tgt_vocab, _ = _build_array(tgt, tgt_vocab, True)
    return ((src_array, tgt_array[:,:-1], src_valid_len, tgt_array[:,1:]),
            src_vocab, tgt_vocab)
@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def __init__(self, batch_size, num_steps=9, num_train=512, num_val=128):
    super(MTFraEng, self).__init__()
    self.save_hyperparameters()
    self.arrays, self.src_vocab, self.tgt_vocab = self._build_arrays(
        self._download())

@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def _build_arrays(self, raw_text, src_vocab=None, tgt_vocab=None):
    def _build_array(sentences, vocab, is_tgt=False):
        pad_or_trim = lambda seq, t: (
            seq[:t] if len(seq) > t else seq + ['<pad>'] * (t - len(seq)))
        sentences = [pad_or_trim(s, self.num_steps) for s in sentences]
        if is_tgt:
            sentences = [['<bos>'] + s for s in sentences]
        if vocab is None:
            vocab = d2l.Vocab(sentences, min_freq=2)
        array = tf.constant([vocab[s] for s in sentences])
        valid_len = tf.reduce_sum(
            tf.cast(array != vocab['<pad>'], tf.int32), 1)
        return array, vocab, valid_len
    src, tgt = self._tokenize(self._preprocess(raw_text),
                              self.num_train + self.num_val)
    src_array, src_vocab, src_valid_len = _build_array(src, src_vocab)
    tgt_array, tgt_vocab, _ = _build_array(tgt, tgt_vocab, True)
    return ((src_array, tgt_array[:,:-1], src_valid_len, tgt_array[:,1:]),
            src_vocab, tgt_vocab)

10.5.4. Reading the Dataset

Finally, we define the get_dataloader method to return the data iterator.

@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def get_dataloader(self, train):
    idx = slice(0, self.num_train) if train else slice(self.num_train, None)
    return self.get_tensorloader(self.arrays, train, idx)

Let’s read the first minibatch from the English–French dataset.

data = MTFraEng(batch_size=3)
src, tgt, src_valid_len, label = next(iter(data.train_dataloader()))
print('source:', src.type(torch.int32))
print('decoder input:', tgt.type(torch.int32))
print('source len excluding pad:', src_valid_len.type(torch.int32))
print('label:', label.type(torch.int32))
source: tensor([[117, 182,   0,   3,   4,   4,   4,   4,   4],
        [ 62,  72,   2,   3,   4,   4,   4,   4,   4],
        [ 57, 124,   0,   3,   4,   4,   4,   4,   4]], dtype=torch.int32)
decoder input: tensor([[  3,  37, 100,  58, 160,   0,   4,   5,   5],
        [  3,   6,   2,   4,   5,   5,   5,   5,   5],
        [  3, 180,   0,   4,   5,   5,   5,   5,   5]], dtype=torch.int32)
source len excluding pad: tensor([4, 4, 4], dtype=torch.int32)
label: tensor([[ 37, 100,  58, 160,   0,   4,   5,   5,   5],
        [  6,   2,   4,   5,   5,   5,   5,   5,   5],
        [180,   0,   4,   5,   5,   5,   5,   5,   5]], dtype=torch.int32)
data = MTFraEng(batch_size=3)
src, tgt, src_valid_len, label = next(iter(data.train_dataloader()))
print('source:', src.astype(np.int32))
print('decoder input:', tgt.astype(np.int32))
print('source len excluding pad:', src_valid_len.astype(np.int32))
print('label:', label.astype(np.int32))
[21:56:41] ../src/storage/storage.cc:196: Using Pooled (Naive) StorageManager for CPU
source: [[ 69 175   2   3   4   4   4   4   4]
 [142 136   2   3   4   4   4   4   4]
 [ 14 119   2   3   4   4   4   4   4]]
decoder input: [[  3   6   0   4   5   5   5   5   5]
 [  3  69  56   2   4   5   5   5   5]
 [  3 165   0   4   5   5   5   5   5]]
source len excluding pad: [4 4 4]
label: [[  6   0   4   5   5   5   5   5   5]
 [ 69  56   2   4   5   5   5   5   5]
 [165   0   4   5   5   5   5   5   5]]
data = MTFraEng(batch_size=3)
src, tgt, src_valid_len, label = next(iter(data.train_dataloader()))
print('source:', src.astype(jnp.int32))
print('decoder input:', tgt.astype(jnp.int32))
print('source len excluding pad:', src_valid_len.astype(jnp.int32))
print('label:', label.astype(jnp.int32))
source: [[ 11 163   2   3   4   4   4   4   4]
 [ 59  13   2   3   4   4   4   4   4]
 [ 39 122   2   3   4   4   4   4   4]]
decoder input: [[  3   6   2   4   5   5   5   5   5]
 [  3 142   0   4   5   5   5   5   5]
 [  3   6   0   4   5   5   5   5   5]]
source len excluding pad: [4 4 4]
label: [[  6   2   4   5   5   5   5   5   5]
 [142   0   4   5   5   5   5   5   5]
 [  6   0   4   5   5   5   5   5   5]]
data = MTFraEng(batch_size=3)
src, tgt, src_valid_len, label = next(iter(data.train_dataloader()))
print('source:', tf.cast(src, tf.int32))
print('decoder input:', tf.cast(tgt, tf.int32))
print('source len excluding pad:', tf.cast(src_valid_len, tf.int32))
print('label:', tf.cast(label, tf.int32))
source: tf.Tensor(
[[155   0   3   4   4   4   4   4   4]
 [ 86  43   2   3   4   4   4   4   4]
 [ 86  76   2   3   4   4   4   4   4]], shape=(3, 9), dtype=int32)
decoder input: tf.Tensor(
[[  3 211   6   0   4   5   5   5   5]
 [  3 108 183  98   2   4   5   5   5]
 [  3 108 183  47 129   2   4   5   5]], shape=(3, 9), dtype=int32)
source len excluding pad: tf.Tensor([3 4 4], shape=(3,), dtype=int32)
label: tf.Tensor(
[[211   6   0   4   5   5   5   5   5]
 [108 183  98   2   4   5   5   5   5]
 [108 183  47 129   2   4   5   5   5]], shape=(3, 9), dtype=int32)

We show a pair of source and target sequences processed by the above _build_arrays method (in the string format).

@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def build(self, src_sentences, tgt_sentences):
    raw_text = '\n'.join([src + '\t' + tgt for src, tgt in zip(
        src_sentences, tgt_sentences)])
    arrays, _, _ = self._build_arrays(
        raw_text, self.src_vocab, self.tgt_vocab)
    return arrays

src, tgt, _,  _ = data.build(['hi .'], ['salut .'])
print('source:', data.src_vocab.to_tokens(src[0].type(torch.int32)))
print('target:', data.tgt_vocab.to_tokens(tgt[0].type(torch.int32)))
source: ['hi', '.', '<eos>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>']
target: ['<bos>', 'salut', '.', '<eos>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>']
@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def build(self, src_sentences, tgt_sentences):
    raw_text = '\n'.join([src + '\t' + tgt for src, tgt in zip(
        src_sentences, tgt_sentences)])
    arrays, _, _ = self._build_arrays(
        raw_text, self.src_vocab, self.tgt_vocab)
    return arrays

src, tgt, _,  _ = data.build(['hi .'], ['salut .'])
print('source:', data.src_vocab.to_tokens(src[0].astype(np.int32)))
print('target:', data.tgt_vocab.to_tokens(tgt[0].astype(np.int32)))
source: ['hi', '.', '<eos>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>']
target: ['<bos>', 'salut', '.', '<eos>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>']
@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def build(self, src_sentences, tgt_sentences):
    raw_text = '\n'.join([src + '\t' + tgt for src, tgt in zip(
        src_sentences, tgt_sentences)])
    arrays, _, _ = self._build_arrays(
        raw_text, self.src_vocab, self.tgt_vocab)
    return arrays

src, tgt, _,  _ = data.build(['hi .'], ['salut .'])
print('source:', data.src_vocab.to_tokens(src[0].astype(jnp.int32)))
print('target:', data.tgt_vocab.to_tokens(tgt[0].astype(jnp.int32)))
source: ['hi', '.', '<eos>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>']
target: ['<bos>', 'salut', '.', '<eos>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>']
@d2l.add_to_class(MTFraEng)  #@save
def build(self, src_sentences, tgt_sentences):
    raw_text = '\n'.join([src + '\t' + tgt for src, tgt in zip(
        src_sentences, tgt_sentences)])
    arrays, _, _ = self._build_arrays(
        raw_text, self.src_vocab, self.tgt_vocab)
    return arrays

src, tgt, _,  _ = data.build(['hi .'], ['salut .'])
print('source:', data.src_vocab.to_tokens(tf.cast(src[0], tf.int32)))
print('target:', data.tgt_vocab.to_tokens(tf.cast(tgt[0], tf.int32)))
source: ['hi', '.', '<eos>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>']
target: ['<bos>', 'salut', '.', '<eos>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>', '<pad>']

10.5.5. Summary

In natural language processing, machine translation refers to the task of automatically mapping from a sequence representing a string of text in a source language to a string representing a plausible translation in a target language. Using word-level tokenization, the vocabulary size will be significantly larger than that using character-level tokenization, but the sequence lengths will be much shorter. To mitigate the large vocabulary size, we can treat infrequent tokens as some “unknown” token. We can truncate and pad text sequences so that all of them will have the same length to be loaded in minibatches. Modern implementations often bucket sequences with similar lengths to avoid wasting excessive computation on padding.

10.5.6. Exercises

  1. Try different values of the max_examples argument in the _tokenize method. How does this affect the vocabulary sizes of the source language and the target language?

  2. Text in some languages such as Chinese and Japanese does not have word boundary indicators (e.g., space). Is word-level tokenization still a good idea for such cases? Why or why not?