  Neural machine translation (MT) models obtain state-of-the-art performance
while maintaining a simple, end-to-end architecture. However, little is known
about what these models learn about source and target languages during the
training process. In this work, we analyze the representations learned by
neural MT models at various levels of granularity and empirically evaluate the
quality of the representations for learning morphology through extrinsic
part-of-speech and morphological tagging tasks. We conduct a thorough
investigation along several parameters: word-based vs. character-based
representations, depth of the encoding layer, the identity of the target
language, and encoder vs. decoder representations. Our data-driven,
quantitative evaluation sheds light on important aspects in the neural MT
system and its ability to capture word structure.
