Trivial Transfer Learning for Low Resource Neural Machine Translation
Transfer learning has been proven as an effective technique for neural machine translation under low resource conditions. Existing methods require a common target language, language relatedness, or specific training tricks and regimes. We present a simple transfer learning method, where we first train a "parent" model for a high resource language pair and then continue the training on a low resource pair only by replacing the training corpus. This "child" model performs significantly better than the baseline trained for low resource pair only. We are the first to show this for targeting different languages, and we observe the improvements even for unrelated languages with different alphabets.
WMT