Only 5\% Attention Is All You Need: Efficient Long-range Document-level
  Neural Machine Translation
Zihan Liu Zewei Sun Shanbo Cheng Shujian Huang Mingxuan Wang
Document-level Neural Machine Translation (DocNMT) has been proven crucial
for handling discourse phenomena by introducing document-level context
information. One of the most important directions is to input the whole
document directly to the standard Transformer model. In this case, efficiency
becomes a critical concern due to the quadratic complexity of the attention
module. Existing studies either focus on the encoder part, which cannot be
deployed on sequence-to-sequence generation tasks, e.g., Machine Translation
(MT), or suffer from a significant performance drop. In this work, we keep the
translation performance while gaining 20\% speed up by introducing extra
selection layer based on lightweight attention that selects a small portion of
tokens to be attended. It takes advantage of the original attention to ensure
performance and dimension reduction to accelerate inference. Experimental
results show that our method could achieve up to 95\% sparsity (only 5\% tokens
attended) approximately, and save 93\% computation cost on the attention module
compared with the original Transformer, while maintaining the performance.