We propose a method to distill a language-agnostic meaning embedding from a multilingual sentence encoder. By removing language-specific information from the original embedding, we retrieve an embedding that fully represents the sentence’s meaning. The proposed method relies only on parallel corpora without any human annotations. Our meaning embedding allows efficient cross-lingual sentence similarity estimation by simple cosine similarity calculation. Experimental results on both quality estimation of machine translation and cross-lingual semantic textual similarity tasks reveal that our method consistently outperforms the strong baselines using the original multilingual embedding. Our method consistently improves the performance of any pre-trained multilingual sentence encoder, even in low-resource language pairs where only tens of thousands of parallel sentence pairs are available.

Curriculum learning has improved the quality of neural machine translation, where only source-side features are considered in the metrics to determine the difficulty of translation. In this study, we apply curriculum learning to paraphrase generation for the first time. Different from machine translation, paraphrase generation allows a certain level of discrepancy in semantics between source and target, which results in diverse transformations from lexical substitution to reordering of clauses. Hence, the difficulty of transformations requires considering both source and target contexts. Experiments on formality transfer using GYAFC showed that our curriculum learning with edit distance improves the quality of paraphrase generation. Additionally, the proposed method improves the quality of difficult samples, which was not possible for previous methods.