Attention over heads: A multi-hop attention for neural machine translation

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a multi-hop attention for the Transformer. It refines the attention for an output symbol by integrating that of each head, and consists of two hops. The first hop attention is the scaled dot-product attention which is the same attention mechanism used in the original Transformer. The second hop attention is a combination of multi-layer perceptron (MLP) attention and head gate, which efficiently increases the complexity of the model by adding dependencies between heads. We demonstrate that the translation accuracy of the proposed multi-hop attention outperforms the baseline Transformer significantly, +0.85 BLEU point for the IWSLT-2017 German-to- English task and +2.58 BLEU point for the WMT-2017 German-to-English task. We also find that the number of parameters required for a multi-hop attention is smaller than that for stacking another self-attention layer and the proposed model converges significantly faster than the original Transformer.