Download and prepare the dataset
We'll use a language dataset provided by http://www.manythings.org/anki/. This dataset contains language translation pairs in the format:
May I borrow this book? ¿Puedo tomar prestado este libro?
There are a variety of languages available, but we'll use the English-Spanish dataset. For convenience, we've hosted a copy of this dataset on Google Cloud, but you can also download your own copy. After downloading the dataset, here are the steps we'll take to prepare the data:
- Add a start and end token to each sentence.
- Clean the sentences by removing special characters.
- Create a word index and reverse word index (dictionaries mapping from word → id and id → word).
- Pad each sentence to a maximum length.
