  Sequence to sequence (SEQ2SEQ) models often lack diversity in their generated
translations. This can be attributed to the limitation of SEQ2SEQ models in
capturing lexical and syntactic variations in a parallel corpus resulting from
different styles, genres, topics, or ambiguity of the translation process. In
this paper, we develop a novel sequence to sequence mixture (S2SMIX) model that
improves both translation diversity and quality by adopting a committee of
specialized translation models rather than a single translation model. Each
mixture component selects its own training dataset via optimization of the
marginal loglikelihood, which leads to a soft clustering of the parallel
corpus. Experiments on four language pairs demonstrate the superiority of our
mixture model compared to a SEQ2SEQ baseline with standard or diversity-boosted
beam search. Our mixture model uses negligible additional parameters and incurs
no extra computation cost during decoding.
