New technique boosts translation accuracy, outperforming previous systems by 2 points.
Neural machine translation has improved translation quality, but sometimes gives wrong meanings, especially with rare words. To fix this, researchers used a pre-translation step with phrase-based machine translation before neural translation. This approach outperformed both the phrase-based and baseline neural systems in English to German translation by up to 2 BLEU points. The initial system's quality affects the final result.