Pivot Based Transfer Learning for Neural Machine Translation: CFILT IITB @ WMT 2021 Triangular MT

Shivam Mhaskar, Pushpak Bhattacharyya


Abstract
In this paper, we discuss the various techniques that we used to implement the Russian-Chinese machine translation system for the Triangular MT task at WMT 2021. Neural Machine translation systems based on transformer architecture have an encoder-decoder architecture, which are trained end-to-end and require a large amount of parallel corpus to produce good quality translations. This is the reason why neural machine translation systems are referred to as data hungry. Such a large amount of parallel corpus is majorly available for language pairs which include English and not for non-English language pairs. This is a major problem in building neural machine translation systems for non-English language pairs. We try to utilize the resources of the English language to improve the translation of non-English language pairs. We use the pivot language, that is English, to leverage transfer learning to improve the quality of Russian-Chinese translation. Compared to the baseline transformer-based neural machine translation system, we observe that the pivot language-based transfer learning technique gives a higher BLEU score.
Anthology ID:
2021.wmt-1.39
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venues:
EMNLP | WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
336–340
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wmt-1.39
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shivam Mhaskar and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2021. Pivot Based Transfer Learning for Neural Machine Translation: CFILT IITB @ WMT 2021 Triangular MT. In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 336–340, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pivot Based Transfer Learning for Neural Machine Translation: CFILT IITB @ WMT 2021 Triangular MT (Mhaskar & Bhattacharyya, WMT 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2021.wmt-1.39.pdf