Balancing Training for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

Xinyi Wang, Yulia Tsvetkov, Graham Neubig


Abstract
When training multilingual machine translation (MT) models that can translate to/from multiple languages, we are faced with imbalanced training sets: some languages have much more training data than others. Standard practice is to up-sample less resourced languages to increase representation, and the degree of up-sampling has a large effect on the overall performance. In this paper, we propose a method that instead automatically learns how to weight training data through a data scorer that is optimized to maximize performance on all test languages. Experiments on two sets of languages under both one-to-many and many-to-one MT settings show our method not only consistently outperforms heuristic baselines in terms of average performance, but also offers flexible control over the performance of which languages are optimized.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.754
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:
8526–8537
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.754
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.754
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinyi Wang, Yulia Tsvetkov, and Graham Neubig. 2020. Balancing Training for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 8526–8537, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Balancing Training for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (Wang et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.754.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928991
Code
 cindyxinyiwang/multiDDS +  additional community code