A common intermediate language representation or an interlingua is the holy grail in machine translation. Thanks to the new neural machine translation approach, it seems that there are good perspectives towards this goal. In this paper, we propose a new architecture based on introducing an interlingua loss as an additional training objective. By adding and forcing this interlingua loss, we are able to train multiple encoders and decoders for each language, sharing a common intermediate representation. Preliminary translation results on the WMT Turkish English and WMT 2019 Kazakh English tasks show improvements over the baseline system. Additionally, since the final objective of our architecture is having compatible encoder decoders based on a common representation, we visualize and evaluate the learned intermediate representations. What is most relevant from our study is that our architecture shows the benefits of the dreamed interlingua since it is capable of: (1) reducing the number of production systems, with respect to the number of languages, from quadratic to linear (2) incrementally adding a new language in the system without retraining languages previously there and (3) allowing for translations from the new language to all the others present in the system
Classical interlingua approaches @cite_28 aim at finding a universal or common language representation that involves a conceptual understanding of all languages over the world. This has been the case of Esperanto @cite_7 or Universal Networking Language @cite_26 and many others. Very differently, in this work, we are focusing on training a common language representation with deep learning techniques. The objective is to train an intermediate representation that allows using independent encoders and decoders for each language. In this scenario, translation systems in a highly multilingual environment get reduced from quadratic to linear and also, translation is available for languages pairs that have not been explicitly trained. Differently, from the classical approach, there is no requirement of semantics for this intermediate representation. Following a similar objective or methodology, most related works are the following ones.
@cite_28 @cite_26 @cite_7
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We propose a simple solution to use a single Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model to translate between multiple languages. Our solution requires no change in the model architecture from our base system but instead introduces an artificial token at the beginning of the input sentence to specify the required target language. The rest of the model, which includes encoder, decoder and attention, remains unchanged and is shared across all languages. Using a shared wordpiece vocabulary, our approach enables Multilingual NMT using a single model without any increase in parameters, which is significantly simpler than previous proposals for Multilingual NMT. Our method often improves the translation quality of all involved language pairs, even while keeping the total number of model parameters constant. On the WMT'14 benchmarks, a single multilingual model achieves comparable performance for English @math French and surpasses state-of-the-art results for English @math German. Similarly, a single multilingual model surpasses state-of-the-art results for French @math English and German @math English on WMT'14 and WMT'15 benchmarks respectively. On production corpora, multilingual models of up to twelve language pairs allow for better translation of many individual pairs. In addition to improving the translation quality of language pairs that the model was trained with, our models can also learn to perform implicit bridging between language pairs never seen explicitly during training, showing that transfer learning and zero-shot translation is possible for neural translation. Finally, we show analyses that hints at a universal interlingua representation in our models and show some interesting ex We propose a simple solution to use a single Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model to translate between multiple languages. Our solution requires no changes to the model architecture from a standard NMT system but instead introduces an artificial token at the beginning of the input sentence to specify the required target language. Using a shared wordpiece vocabulary, our approach enables Multilingual NMT using a single model. On the WMT14 benchmarks, a single multilingual model achieves comparable performance for EnglishFrench and surpasses state-of-the-art results for EnglishGerman. Similarly, a single multilingual model surpasses state-of-the-art results for FrenchEnglish and GermanEnglish on WMT14 and WMT15 benchmarks, respectively. On production corpora, multilingual models of up to twelve language pairs allow for better translation of many individual pairs. Our models can also learn to perform implicit bridging between language pairs never seen explicitly during training, showing that transfer learning and zero-shot translation is possible for neural translation. Finally, we show analyses that hints at a universal interlingua representation in our models and show some interesting examples when mixing languages. This work focuses on the task of finding latent vector representations of the words in a corpus. In particular, we address the issue of what to do when there are multiple languages in the corpus. Prior work has, among other techniques, used canonical correlation analysis to project pre-trained vectors in two languages into a common space. We propose a simple and scalable method that is inspired by the notion that the learned vector representations should be invariant to translation between languages. We show empirically that our method outperforms prior work on multilingual tasks, matches the performance of prior work on monolingual tasks, and scales linearly with the size of the input data (and thus the number of languages being embedded).