scholarly journals Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation

Author(s):  
Melvin Johnson ◽  
Mike Schuster ◽  
Quoc V. Le ◽  
Maxim Krikun ◽  
Yonghui Wu ◽  
...  

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 systems using a single model. On the WMT’14 benchmarks, a single multilingual model achieves comparable performance for English→French and surpasses state-of-theart results for English→German. Similarly, a single multilingual model surpasses state-of-the-art results for French→English and German→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. 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 also show some interesting examples when mixing languages.

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (01) ◽  
pp. 2050002
Author(s):  
Taichi Aida ◽  
Kazuhide Yamamoto

Current methods of neural machine translation may generate sentences with different levels of quality. Methods for automatically evaluating translation output from machine translation can be broadly classified into two types: a method that uses human post-edited translations for training an evaluation model, and a method that uses a reference translation that is the correct answer during evaluation. On the one hand, it is difficult to prepare post-edited translations because it is necessary to tag each word in comparison with the original translated sentences. On the other hand, users who actually employ the machine translation system do not have a correct reference translation. Therefore, we propose a method that trains the evaluation model without using human post-edited sentences and in the test set, estimates the quality of output sentences without using reference translations. We define some indices and predict the quality of translations with a regression model. For the quality of the translated sentences, we employ the BLEU score calculated from the number of word [Formula: see text]-gram matches between the translated sentence and the reference translation. After that, we compute the correlation between quality scores predicted by our method and BLEU actually computed from references. According to the experimental results, the correlation with BLEU is the highest when XGBoost uses all the indices. Moreover, looking at each index, we find that the sentence log-likelihood and the model uncertainty, which are based on the joint probability of generating the translated sentence, are important in BLEU estimation.


Author(s):  
Long Zhou ◽  
Jiajun Zhang ◽  
Chengqing Zong

Existing approaches to neural machine translation (NMT) generate the target language sequence token-by-token from left to right. However, this kind of unidirectional decoding framework cannot make full use of the target-side future contexts which can be produced in a right-to-left decoding direction, and thus suffers from the issue of unbalanced outputs. In this paper, we introduce a synchronous bidirectional–neural machine translation (SB-NMT) that predicts its outputs using left-to-right and right-to-left decoding simultaneously and interactively, in order to leverage both of the history and future information at the same time. Specifically, we first propose a new algorithm that enables synchronous bidirectional decoding in a single model. Then, we present an interactive decoding model in which left-to-right (right-to-left) generation does not only depend on its previously generated outputs, but also relies on future contexts predicted by right-to-left (left-to-right) decoding. We extensively evaluate the proposed SB-NMT model on large-scale NIST Chinese-English, WMT14 English-German, and WMT18 Russian-English translation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves significant improvements over the strong Transformer model by 3.92, 1.49, and 1.04 BLEU points, respectively, and obtains the state-of-the-art per- formance on Chinese-English and English- German translation tasks. 1


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (16) ◽  
pp. 7662
Author(s):  
Yong-Seok Choi ◽  
Yo-Han Park ◽  
Seung Yun ◽  
Sang-Hun Kim ◽  
Kong-Joo Lee

Korean and Japanese have different writing scripts but share the same Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. In this study, we pre-train a language-generation model using a Masked Sequence-to-Sequence pre-training (MASS) method on Korean and Japanese monolingual corpora. When building the pre-trained generation model, we allow the smallest number of shared vocabularies between the two languages. Then, we build an unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system between Korean and Japanese based on the pre-trained generation model. Despite the different writing scripts and few shared vocabularies, the unsupervised NMT system performs well compared to other pairs of languages. Our interest is in the common characteristics of both languages that make the unsupervised NMT perform so well. In this study, we propose a new method to analyze cross-attentions between a source and target language to estimate the language differences from the perspective of machine translation. We calculate cross-attention measurements between Korean–Japanese and Korean–English pairs and compare their performances and characteristics. The Korean–Japanese pair has little difference in word order and a morphological system, and thus the unsupervised NMT between Korean and Japanese can be trained well even without parallel sentences and shared vocabularies.


2022 ◽  
Vol 2022 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Syed Abdul Basit Andrabi ◽  
Abdul Wahid

Machine translation is an ongoing field of research from the last decades. The main aim of machine translation is to remove the language barrier. Earlier research in this field started with the direct word-to-word replacement of source language by the target language. Later on, with the advancement in computer and communication technology, there was a paradigm shift to data-driven models like statistical and neural machine translation approaches. In this paper, we have used a neural network-based deep learning technique for English to Urdu languages. Parallel corpus sizes of around 30923 sentences are used. The corpus contains sentences from English-Urdu parallel corpus, news, and sentences which are frequently used in day-to-day life. The corpus contains 542810 English tokens and 540924 Urdu tokens, and the proposed system is trained and tested using 70 : 30 criteria. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed system, several automatic evaluation metrics are used, and the model output is also compared with the output from Google Translator. The proposed model has an average BLEU score of 45.83.


Author(s):  
Tong Xiao ◽  
Yinqiao Li ◽  
Jingbo Zhu ◽  
Zhengtao Yu ◽  
Tongran Liu

Recently, the Transformer machine translation system has shown strong results by stacking attention layers on both the source and target-language sides. But the inference of this model is slow due to the heavy use of dot-product attention in auto-regressive decoding. In this paper we speed up Transformer via a fast and lightweight attention model. More specifically, we share attention weights in adjacent layers and enable the efficient re-use of hidden states in a vertical manner. Moreover, the sharing policy can be jointly learned with the MT model. We test our approach on ten WMT and NIST OpenMT tasks. Experimental results show that it yields an average of 1.3X speed-up (with almost no decrease in BLEU) on top of a state-of-the-art implementation that has already adopted a cache for fast inference. Also, our approach obtains a 1.8X speed-up when it works with the AAN model. This is even 16 times faster than the baseline with no use of the attention cache.


Author(s):  
Rashmini Naranpanawa ◽  
Ravinga Perera ◽  
Thilakshi Fonseka ◽  
Uthayasanker Thayasivam

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a remarkable approach which performs much better than the Statistical machine translation (SMT) models when there is an abundance of parallel corpus. However, vanilla NMT is primarily based upon word-level with a fixed vocabulary. Therefore, low resource morphologically rich languages such as Sinhala are mostly affected by the out of vocabulary (OOV) and Rare word problems. Recent advancements in subword techniques have opened up opportunities for low resource communities by enabling open vocabulary translation. In this paper, we extend our recently published state-of-the-art EN-SI translation system using the transformer and explore standard subword techniques on top of it to identify which subword approach has a greater effect on English Sinhala language pair. Our models demonstrate that subword segmentation strategies along with the state-of-the-art NMT can perform remarkably when translating English sentences into a rich morphology language regardless of a large parallel corpus.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 51-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Wolk ◽  
Krzysztof P. Marasek

The quality of machine translation is rapidly evolving. Today one can find several machine translation systems on the web that provide reasonable translations, although the systems are not perfect. In some specific domains, the quality may decrease. A recently proposed approach to this domain is neural machine translation. It aims at building a jointly-tuned single neural network that maximizes translation performance, a very different approach from traditional statistical machine translation. Recently proposed neural machine translation models often belong to the encoder-decoder family in which a source sentence is encoded into a fixed length vector that is, in turn, decoded to generate a translation. The present research examines the effects of different training methods on a Polish-English Machine Translation system used for medical data. The European Medicines Agency parallel text corpus was used as the basis for training of neural and statistical network-based translation systems. A comparison and implementation of a medical translator is the main focus of our experiments.


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