  Building models that take advantage of the hierarchical structure of language
without a priori annotation is a longstanding goal in natural language
processing. We introduce such a model for the task of machine translation,
pairing a recurrent neural network grammar encoder with a novel attentional
RNNG decoder and applying policy gradient reinforcement learning to induce
unsupervised tree structures on both the source and target. When trained on
character-level datasets with no explicit segmentation or parse annotation, the
model learns a plausible segmentation and shallow parse, obtaining performance
close to an attentional baseline.
