a neural interlingua for multilingual machine translation

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1804.08198
• Publication Date: 2018-01-01
• Authors: Phillip Keung; Jason Sun; Faisal Ladhak; Shaonan Zhang; Vikas Bhardwaj; Yichao Lu
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Computation and Language; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology; Computation and Language (cs.CL)

Accepted in WMT 18<br/>We incorporate an explicit neural interlingua into a multilingual encoder-decoder neural machine translation (NMT) architecture. We demonstrate that our model learns a language-independent representation by performing direct zero-shot translation (without using pivot translation), and by using the source sentence embeddings to create an English Yelp review classifier that, through the mediation of the neural interlingua, can also classify French and German reviews. Furthermore, we show that, despite using a smaller number of parameters than a pairwise collection of bilingual NMT models, our approach produces comparable BLEU scores for each language pair in WMT15.<br/>