Paper Info
Title
Multilingual Mix: Example Interpolation Improves Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Abstract
Multilingual neural machine translation models are trained to maximize the likelihood of a mix of examples drawn from multiple language pairs. The dominant inductive bias applied to these models is a shared vocabulary and a shared set of parameters across languages; the inputs and labels corresponding to examples drawn from different language pairs might still reside in distinct subspaces. In this paper, we introduce multilingual crossover encoder-decoder (mXEncDec) to fuse language pairs at an instance level. Our approach interpolates instances from different language pairs into joint 'crossover examples' in order to encourage sharing input and output spaces across languages. To ensure better fusion of examples in multilingual settings, we propose several techniques to improve example interpolation across dissimilar languages under heavy data imbalance. Experiments on a large-scale WMT multilingual dataset demonstrate that our approach significantly improves quality on English-to-Many, Many-to-English and zero-shot translation tasks (from +0.5 BLEU up to +5.5 BLEU points). Results on code-switching sets demonstrate the capability of our approach to improve model generalization to out-of-distribution multilingual examples. We also conduct qualitative and quantitative representation comparisons to analyze the advantages of our approach at the representation level.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.282
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 60TH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS (ACL 2022), VOL 1: (LONG PAPERS)
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Conference
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yong Cheng1645.90
Ankur Bapna2368.45
Orhan Firat328129.13
Yuan Cao454835.60
Pidong Wang500.34
Wolfgang Macherey661745.06