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Register a new userMassively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
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Added by
Roee Aharoni
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) enables training a single model that supports translation from multiple source languages into multiple target languages. In this paper, we push the limits of multilingual NMT in terms of number of languages being used. We perform extensive experiments in training massively multilingual NMT models, translating up to 102 languages to and from English within a single model. We explore different setups for training such models and analyze the trade-offs between translation quality and various modeling decisions. We report results on the publicly available TED talks multilingual corpus where we show that massively multilingual many-to-many models are effective in low resource settings, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art while supporting up to 59 languages. Our experiments on a large-scale dataset with 102 languages to and from English and up to one million examples per direction also show promising results, surpassing strong bilingual baselines and encouraging future work on massively multilingual NMT.
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The recently proposed massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) system has been shown to be capable of translating over 100 languages to and from English within a single model. Its improved translation performance on low resource languages hints at potential cross-lingual transfer capability for downstream tasks. In this paper, we evaluate the cross-lingual effectiveness of representations from the encoder of a massively multilingual NMT model on 5 downstream classification and sequence labeling tasks covering a diverse set of over 50 languages. We compare against a strong baseline, multilingual BERT (mBERT), in different cross-lingual transfer learning scenarios and show gains in zero-shot transfer in 4 out of these 5 tasks.
We introduce our efforts towards building a universal neural machine translation (NMT) system capable of translating between any language pair. We set a milestone towards this goal by building a single massively multilingual NMT model handling 103 languages trained on over 25 billion examples. Our system demonstrates effective transfer learning ability, significantly improving translation quality of low-resource languages, while keeping high-resource language translation quality on-par with competitive bilingual baselines. We provide in-depth analysis of various aspects of model building that are crucial to achieving quality and practicality in universal NMT. While we prototype a high-quality universal translation system, our extensive empirical analysis exposes issues that need to be further addressed, and we suggest directions for future research.
Multilingual neural machine translation (NMT), which translates multiple languages using a single model, is of great practical importance due to its advantages in simplifying the training process, reducing online maintenance costs, and enhancing low-resource and zero-shot translation. Given there are thousands of languages in the world and some of them are very different, it is extremely burdensome to handle them all in a single model or use a separate model for each language pair. Therefore, given a fixed resource budget, e.g., the number of models, how to determine which languages should be supported by one model is critical to multilingual NMT, which, unfortunately, has been ignored by previous work. In this work, we develop a framework that clusters languages into different groups and trains one multilingual model for each cluster. We study two methods for language clustering: (1) using prior knowledge, where we cluster languages according to language family, and (2) using language embedding, in which we represent each language by an embedding vector and cluster them in the embedding space. In particular, we obtain the embedding vectors of all the languages by training a universal neural machine translation model. Our experiments on 23 languages show that the first clustering method is simple and easy to understand but leading to suboptimal translation accuracy, while the second method sufficiently captures the relationship among languages well and improves the translation accuracy for almost all the languages over baseline methods
Multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) has recently been investigated from different aspects (e.g., pivot translation, zero-shot translation, fine-tuning, or training from scratch) and in different settings (e.g., rich resource and low resource, one-to-many, and many-to-one translation). This paper concentrates on a deep understanding of multilingual NMT and conducts a comprehensive study on a multilingual dataset with more than 20 languages. Our results show that (1) low-resource language pairs benefit much from multilingual training, while rich-resource language pairs may get hurt under limited model capacity and training with similar languages benefits more than dissimilar languages; (2) fine-tuning performs better than training from scratch in the one-to-many setting while training from scratch performs better in the many-to-one setting; (3) the bottom layers of the encoder and top layers of the decoder capture more language-specific information, and just fine-tuning these parts can achieve good accuracy for low-resource language pairs; (4) direct translation is better than pivot translation when the source language is similar to the target language (e.g., in the same language branch), even when the size of direct training data is much smaller; (5) given a fixed training data budget, it is better to introduce more languages into multilingual training for zero-shot translation.
Multilingual NMT has become an attractive solution for MT deployment in production. But to match bilingual quality, it comes at the cost of larger and slower models. In this work, we consider several ways to make multilingual NMT faster at inference without degrading its quality. We experiment with several light decoder architectures in two 20-language multi-parallel settings: small-scale on TED Talks and large-scale on ParaCrawl. Our experiments demonstrate that combining a shallow decoder with vocabulary filtering leads to more than twice faster inference with no loss in translation quality. We validate our findings with BLEU and chrF (on 380 language pairs), robustness evaluation and human evaluation.
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