The Helsinki Neural Machine Translation System

We introduce the Helsinki Neural Machine Translation system (HNMT) and how it is applied in the news translation task at WMT 2017, where it ranked first in both the human and automatic evaluations for English–Finnish. We discuss the success of English–Finnish translations and the overall advantage of NMT over a strong SMT baseline. We also discuss our submissions for English–Latvian, English–Chinese and Chinese–English.