Improving Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation and Zero-Shot Translation

Biao Zhang, Philip Williams, Ivan Titov, Rico Sennrich


Abstract
Massively multilingual models for neural machine translation (NMT) are theoretically attractive, but often underperform bilingual models and deliver poor zero-shot translations. In this paper, we explore ways to improve them. We argue that multilingual NMT requires stronger modeling capacity to support language pairs with varying typological characteristics, and overcome this bottleneck via language-specific components and deepening NMT architectures. We identify the off-target translation issue (i.e. translating into a wrong target language) as the major source of the inferior zero-shot performance, and propose random online backtranslation to enforce the translation of unseen training language pairs. Experiments on OPUS-100 (a novel multilingual dataset with 100 languages) show that our approach substantially narrows the performance gap with bilingual models in both one-to-many and many-to-many settings, and improves zero-shot performance by ~10 BLEU, approaching conventional pivot-based methods.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.148
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1628–1639
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.148
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.148
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Biao Zhang, Philip Williams, Ivan Titov, and Rico Sennrich. 2020. Improving Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation and Zero-Shot Translation. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1628–1639, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation and Zero-Shot Translation (Zhang et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.148.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929037
Code
 bzhangGo/zero +  additional community code
Data
OPUS-100