Most existing machine translation systems operate at the level of words, relying on explicit segmentation to extract tokens. We introduce a neural machine translation (NMT) model that maps a source character sequence to a target character sequence without any segmentation. We employ a character-level convolutional network with max-pooling at the encoder to reduce the length of source representation, allowing the model to be trained at a speed comparable to subword-level models while capturing local regularities. Our character-to-character model outperforms a recently proposed baseline with a subword-level encoder on WMT'15 DE-EN and CS-EN, and gives comparable performance on FI-EN and RU-EN. We then demonstrate that it is possible to share a single character-level encoder across multiple languages by training a model on a many-to-one translation task. In this multilingual setting, the character-level encoder significantly outperforms the subword-level encoder on all the language pairs. We also observe that the quality of the multilingual character-level translation even surpasses the models trained and tuned on one language pair, namely on CS-EN, FI-EN and RU-EN.

该研究提出了一个无需分词的神经机器翻译模型，在WMT'15数据集上使用多语言字符级编码器和基于字符卷积神经网络的模型，不仅速度快，泛化性能好，而且能够跨多语言实现高质量普适翻译，效果优于子词级编码器。

不需显式分段的全字符级神经机器翻译