language-invariant representation
On learning language-invariant representations for universal machine translation
Despite the recent improvements in neural machine translation (NMT), training a large NMT model with hundreds of millions of parameters usually requires a collection of parallel corpora at a large scale, on the order of millions or even billions of aligned sentences for supervised training (Arivazhagan et al.). While it might be possible to automatically crawl the web to collect parallel sentences for high-resource language pairs, such as German-English and French-English, it is often infeasible or expensive to manually translate large amounts of sentences for low-resource language pairs, such as Nepali-English, Sinhala-English, etc. To this end, the goal of the so-called multilingual universal machine translation, a.k.a., universal machine translation (UMT), is to learn to translate between any pair of languages using a single system, given pairs of translated documents for some of these languages. The hope is that by learning a shared "semantic space" between multiple source and target languages, the model can leverage language-invariant structure from high-resource translation pairs to transfer to the translation between low-resource language pairs, or even enable zero-shot translation. Indeed, training such a single massively multilingual model has gained impressive empirical results, especially in the case of low-resource language pairs (see Figure 1).