Multilingual Representation Distillation with Contrastive Learning

Weiting Tan, Kevin Heffernan, Holger Schwenk, Philipp Koehn


Abstract
Multilingual sentence representations from large models encode semantic information from two or more languages and can be used for different cross-lingual information retrieval and matching tasks. In this paper, we integrate contrastive learning into multilingual representation distillation and use it for quality estimation of parallel sentences (i.e., find semantically similar sentences that can be used as translations of each other). We validate our approach with multilingual similarity search and corpus filtering tasks. Experiments across different low-resource languages show that our method greatly outperforms previous sentence encoders such as LASER, LASER3, and LaBSE.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.108
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1477–1490
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.108
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.108
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weiting Tan, Kevin Heffernan, Holger Schwenk, and Philipp Koehn. 2023. Multilingual Representation Distillation with Contrastive Learning. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1477–1490, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual Representation Distillation with Contrastive Learning (Tan et al., EACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.108.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.108.mp4