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Current end-to-end approaches to Spoken Language Translation (SLT) rely on limited training resources, especially for multilingual settings. On the other hand, Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MultiNMT) approaches rely on…
Multilingual neural machine translation systems learn to map sentences of different languages into a common representation space. Intuitively, with a growing number of seen languages the encoder sentence representation grows more flexible…
Many data sets (e.g., reviews, forums, news, etc.) exist parallelly in multiple languages. They all cover the same content, but the linguistic differences make it impossible to use traditional, bag-of-word-based topic models. Models have to…
Zero-shot translation is a promising direction for building a comprehensive multilingual neural machine translation~(MNMT) system. However, its quality is still not satisfactory due to off-target issues. In this paper, we aim to understand…
Recent advances in training multilingual language models on large datasets seem to have shown promising results in knowledge transfer across languages and achieve high performance on downstream tasks. However, we question to what extent the…
Machine translation has an undesirable propensity to produce "translationese" artifacts, which can lead to higher BLEU scores while being liked less by human raters. Motivated by this, we model translationese and original (i.e. natural)…
We frame the task of machine translation evaluation as one of scoring machine translation output with a sequence-to-sequence paraphraser, conditioned on a human reference. We propose training the paraphraser as a multilingual NMT system,…
In this study, we revisit the commonly-cited off-target issue in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT). By carefully designing experiments on different MNMT scenarios and models, we attribute the off-target issue to the overfitting…
Understanding representation transfer in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) can reveal the reason for the zero-shot translation deficiency. In this work, we systematically analyze the representational issue of MNMT models. We…
The many-to-many multilingual neural machine translation can be regarded as the process of integrating semantic features from the source sentences and linguistic features from the target sentences. To enhance zero-shot translation, models…
Existing zero-shot cross-lingual transfer methods rely on parallel corpora or bilingual dictionaries, which are expensive and impractical for low-resource languages. To disengage from these dependencies, researchers have explored training…
The capacity and effectiveness of pre-trained multilingual models (MLMs) for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is well established. However, phenomena of positive or negative transfer, and the effect of language choice still need to be fully…
The ability of zero-shot translation emerges when we train a multilingual model with certain translation directions; the model can then directly translate in unseen directions. Alternatively, zero-shot translation can be accomplished by…
Achieving universal translation between all human language pairs is the holy-grail of machine translation (MT) research. While recent progress in massively multilingual MT is one step closer to reaching this goal, it is becoming evident…
Over the last few years two promising research directions in low-resource neural machine translation (NMT) have emerged. The first focuses on utilizing high-resource languages to improve the quality of low-resource languages via…
Multilingual pre-trained models have achieved remarkable performance on cross-lingual transfer learning. Some multilingual models such as mBERT, have been pre-trained on unlabeled corpora, therefore the embeddings of different languages in…
This paper proposes a simple yet effective method to improve direct (X-to-Y) translation for both cases: zero-shot and when direct data is available. We modify the input tokens at both the encoder and decoder to include signals for the…
Monolingual data have been demonstrated to be helpful in improving translation quality of both statistical machine translation (SMT) systems and neural machine translation (NMT) systems, especially in resource-poor or domain adaptation…
We present effective pre-training strategies for neural machine translation (NMT) using parallel corpora involving a pivot language, i.e., source-pivot and pivot-target, leading to a significant improvement in source-target translation. We…
We explore the transferability of a multilingual neural machine translation model to unseen languages when the transfer is grounded solely on the cross-lingual word embeddings. Our experimental results show that the translation knowledge…