Unsupervised Bilingual Word Embedding Agreement for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation

Haipeng Sun, Rui Wang, Kehai Chen, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita, Tiejun Zhao


Abstract
Unsupervised bilingual word embedding (UBWE), together with other technologies such as back-translation and denoising, has helped unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) achieve remarkable results in several language pairs. In previous methods, UBWE is first trained using non-parallel monolingual corpora and then this pre-trained UBWE is used to initialize the word embedding in the encoder and decoder of UNMT. That is, the training of UBWE and UNMT are separate. In this paper, we first empirically investigate the relationship between UBWE and UNMT. The empirical findings show that the performance of UNMT is significantly affected by the performance of UBWE. Thus, we propose two methods that train UNMT with UBWE agreement. Empirical results on several language pairs show that the proposed methods significantly outperform conventional UNMT.
Anthology ID:
P19-1119
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1235–1245
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1119
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1119
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haipeng Sun, Rui Wang, Kehai Chen, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita, and Tiejun Zhao. 2019. Unsupervised Bilingual Word Embedding Agreement for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1235–1245, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unsupervised Bilingual Word Embedding Agreement for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (Sun et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1119.pdf