No Arabic abstract
Recently, token-level adaptive training has achieved promising improvement in machine translation, where the cross-entropy loss function is adjusted by assigning different training weights to different tokens, in order to alleviate the token imbalance problem. However, previous approaches only use static word frequency information in the target language without considering the source language, which is insufficient for bilingual tasks like machine translation. In this paper, we propose a novel bilingual mutual information (BMI) based adaptive objective, which measures the learning difficulty for each target token from the perspective of bilingualism, and assigns an adaptive weight accordingly to improve token-level adaptive training. This method assigns larger training weights to tokens with higher BMI, so that easy tokens are updated with coarse granularity while difficult tokens are updated with fine granularity. Experimental results on WMT14 English-to-German and WMT19 Chinese-to-English demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared with the Transformer baseline and previous token-level adaptive training approaches. Further analyses confirm that our method can improve the lexical diversity.
Recent studies have demonstrated a perceivable improvement on the performance of neural machine translation by applying cross-lingual language model pretraining (Lample and Conneau, 2019), especially the Translation Language Modeling (TLM). To alleviate the need for expensive parallel corpora by TLM, in this work, we incorporate the translation information from dictionaries into the pretraining process and propose a novel Bilingual Dictionary-based Language Model (BDLM). We evaluate our BDLM in Chinese, English, and Romanian. For Chinese-English, we obtained a 55.0 BLEU on WMT-News19 (Tiedemann, 2012) and a 24.3 BLEU on WMT20 news-commentary, outperforming the Vanilla Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) by more than 8.4 BLEU and 2.3 BLEU, respectively. According to our results, the BDLM also has advantages on convergence speed and predicting rare words. The increase in BLEU for WMT16 Romanian-English also shows its effectiveness in low-resources language translation.
In this paper, we propose a new task of machine translation (MT), which is based on no parallel sentences but can refer to a ground-truth bilingual dictionary. Motivated by the ability of a monolingual speaker learning to translate via looking up the bilingual dictionary, we propose the task to see how much potential an MT system can attain using the bilingual dictionary and large scale monolingual corpora, while is independent on parallel sentences. We propose anchored training (AT) to tackle the task. AT uses the bilingual dictionary to establish anchoring points for closing the gap between source language and target language. Experiments on various language pairs show that our approaches are significantly better than various baselines, including dictionary-based word-by-word translation, dictionary-supervised cross-lingual word embedding transformation, and unsupervised MT. On distant language pairs that are hard for unsupervised MT to perform well, AT performs remarkably better, achieving performances comparable to supervised SMT trained on more than 4M parallel sentences.
Word embedding is central to neural machine translation (NMT), which has attracted intensive research interest in recent years. In NMT, the source embedding plays the role of the entrance while the target embedding acts as the terminal. These layers occupy most of the model parameters for representation learning. Furthermore, they indirectly interface via a soft-attention mechanism, which makes them comparatively isolated. In this paper, we propose shared-private bilingual word embeddings, which give a closer relationship between the source and target embeddings, and which also reduce the number of model parameters. For similar source and target words, their embeddings tend to share a part of the features and they cooperatively learn these common representation units. Experiments on 5 language pairs belonging to 6 different language families and written in 5 different alphabets demonstrate that the proposed model provides a significant performance boost over the strong baselines with dramatically fewer model parameters.
The attentional mechanism has proven to be effective in improving end-to-end neural machine translation. However, due to the intricate structural divergence between natural languages, unidirectional attention-based models might only capture partial aspects of attentional regularities. We propose agreement-based joint training for bidirectional attention-based end-to-end neural machine translation. Instead of training source-to-target and target-to-source translation models independently,our approach encourages the two complementary models to agree on word alignment matrices on the same training data. Experiments on Chinese-English and English-French translation tasks show that agreement-based joint training significantly improves both alignment and translation quality over independent training.
We investigate the following question for machine translation (MT): can we develop a single universal MT model to serve as the common seed and obtain derivative and improved models on arbitrary language pairs? We propose mRASP, an approach to pre-train a universal multilingual neural machine translation model. Our key idea in mRASP is its novel technique of random aligned substitution, which brings words and phrases with similar meanings across multiple languages closer in the representation space. We pre-train a mRASP model on 32 language pairs jointly with only public datasets. The model is then fine-tuned on downstream language pairs to obtain specialized MT models. We carry out extensive experiments on 42 translation directions across a diverse settings, including low, medium, rich resource, and as well as transferring to exotic language pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that mRASP achieves significant performance improvement compared to directly training on those target pairs. It is the first time to verify that multiple low-resource language pairs can be utilized to improve rich resource MT. Surprisingly, mRASP is even able to improve the translation quality on exotic languages that never occur in the pre-training corpus. Code, data, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/linzehui/mRASP.