Machine Translation users care about quality and performance. Based on our own observations and the feedback we’ve received; the quality of our Neural MT is impressive. Evaluating performance is a stickier subject, but we’d like to dig our hands in and present our innovations and achievements and how it benefits NMT users.

By performance we mostly mean the manner in which a system performs in terms of speed and efficiency in varying production environments. It is important to note that performance and quality in Neural MT are tightly connected: it is easy to accelerate a given model compromising on the quality. Therefore, when evaluating performance improvement, we always check that quality remains very close to optimal quality.

Since switching to NMT at the end of 2016, we’ve invested our R&D efforts into optimizing our engines to be more efficient, while maintaining and even improving translation accuracy. Our latest, 2nd generation NMT engines, available in our latest release of SYSTRAN Pure Neural® Server, implements several technical optimizations that make the translation faster and more efficient.

New model architecture

The first generation of neural translation engines was based on recurrent neural networks (RNN). This architecture requires the source text to be encoded sequentially, word by word, before generating the translation.