July 29, 2019
Zero-shot translation, translating between language pairs on which a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system has never been trained, is an emergent property when training the system in multilingual settings. However, naive training for zero-shot NMT easily fails, and is sensitive to hyper-parameter setting. The performance typically lags far behind the more conventional pivot-based approach which translates twice using a third language as a pivot. In this work, we address the degeneracy problem due to capturing spurious correlations by quantitatively analyzing the mutual information between language IDs of the source and decoded sentences. Inspired by this analysis, we propose to use two simple but effective approaches: (1) decoder pre-training; (2) back-translation. These methods show significant improvement (4~22 BLEU points) over the vanilla zero-shot translation on three challenging multilingual datasets, and achieve similar or better results than the pivot-based approach.
Written by
Jiatao Gu
Kyunghyun Cho
Victor O.K. Li
Yong Wang
Publisher
ACL
Research Topics
July 23, 2024
Llama team
July 23, 2024
June 25, 2024
Elena Voita, Javier Ferrando Monsonis, Christoforos Nalmpantis
June 25, 2024
June 25, 2024
Min-Jae Hwang, Ilia Kulikov, Benjamin Peloquin, Hongyu Gong, Peng-Jen Chen, Ann Lee
June 25, 2024
June 14, 2024
Sheng-Chieh Lin, Akari Asai, Minghan Li, Barlas Oguz, Jimmy Lin, Scott Yih, Xilun Chen
June 14, 2024
Product experiences
Foundational models
Product experiences
Latest news
Foundational models