A neural interlingua for multilingual machine translation

Yichao Lu, Phillip Keung, Faisal Ladhak, Vikas Bhardwaj, Shaonan Zhang, Jason Sun


Abstract
We incorporate an explicit neural interlingua into a multilingual encoder-decoder neural machine translation (NMT) architecture. We demonstrate that our model learns a language-independent representation by performing direct zero-shot translation (without using pivot translation), and by using the source sentence embeddings to create an English Yelp review classifier that, through the mediation of the neural interlingua, can also classify French and German reviews. Furthermore, we show that, despite using a smaller number of parameters than a pairwise collection of bilingual NMT models, our approach produces comparable BLEU scores for each language pair in WMT15.
Anthology ID:
W18-6309
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Research Papers
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
84–92
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6309
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-6309
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yichao Lu, Phillip Keung, Faisal Ladhak, Vikas Bhardwaj, Shaonan Zhang, and Jason Sun. 2018. A neural interlingua for multilingual machine translation. In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Research Papers, pages 84–92, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A neural interlingua for multilingual machine translation (Lu et al., WMT 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/W18-6309.pdf