English

Trivial Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation

Computation and Language 2020-07-09 v1

Abstract

Transfer learning has been proven as an effective technique for neural machine translation under low-resource conditions. Existing methods require a common target language, language relatedness, or specific training tricks and regimes. We present a simple transfer learning method, where we first train a "parent" model for a high-resource language pair and then continue the training on a lowresource pair only by replacing the training corpus. This "child" model performs significantly better than the baseline trained for lowresource pair only. We are the first to show this for targeting different languages, and we observe the improvements even for unrelated languages with different alphabets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.00357,
  title  = {Trivial Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation},
  author = {Tom Kocmi and Ondřej Bojar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.00357},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Accepted to WMT18 reseach paper, Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Machine Translation 2018

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:52:02.136Z