Joint Dropout: Improving Generalizability in Low-Resource Neural Machine
  Translation through Phrase Pair Variables
Ali Araabi Vlad Niculae Christof Monz
Despite the tremendous success of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), its
performance on low-resource language pairs still remains subpar, partly due to
the limited ability to handle previously unseen inputs, i.e., generalization.
In this paper, we propose a method called Joint Dropout, that addresses the
challenge of low-resource neural machine translation by substituting phrases
with variables, resulting in significant enhancement of compositionality, which
is a key aspect of generalization. We observe a substantial improvement in
translation quality for language pairs with minimal resources, as seen in BLEU
and Direct Assessment scores. Furthermore, we conduct an error analysis, and
find Joint Dropout to also enhance generalizability of low-resource NMT in
terms of robustness and adaptability across different domains