@InProceedings{gu-EtAl:2018:N18-1,
  author    = {Gu, Jiatao  and  Hassan, Hany  and  Devlin, Jacob  and  Li, Victor O.K.},
  title     = {Universal Neural Machine Translation for Extremely Low Resource Languages},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)},
  month     = {June},
  year      = {2018},
  address   = {New Orleans, Louisiana},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {344--354},
  abstract  = {In this paper, we propose a new universal machine translation approach focusing on languages with a limited amount of parallel data. Our proposed approach utilizes a transfer-learning approach to share lexical and sentence level representations across multiple source languages into one target language. The lexical part is shared through a Universal Lexical Representation to support multi-lingual word-level sharing. The sentence-level sharing is represented by a model of experts from all source languages that share the source encoders with all other languages. This enables the low-resource language to utilize the lexical and sentence representations of the higher resource languages. Our approach is able to achieve 23 BLEU on Romanian-English WMT2016 using a tiny parallel corpus of 6k sentences, compared to the 18 BLEU of strong baseline system which uses multi-lingual training and back-translation. Furthermore, we show that the proposed approach can achieve almost 20 BLEU on the same dataset through fine-tuning a pre-trained multi-lingual system in a zero-shot setting.},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N18-1032}
}