Petre Petrov


2019

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Pivot-based Transfer Learning for Neural Machine Translation between Non-English Languages
Yunsu Kim | Petre Petrov | Pavel Petrushkov | Shahram Khadivi | Hermann Ney
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

We present effective pre-training strategies for neural machine translation (NMT) using parallel corpora involving a pivot language, i.e., source-pivot and pivot-target, leading to a significant improvement in source-target translation. We propose three methods to increase the relation among source, pivot, and target languages in the pre-training: 1) step-wise training of a single model for different language pairs, 2) additional adapter component to smoothly connect pre-trained encoder and decoder, and 3) cross-lingual encoder training via autoencoding of the pivot language. Our methods greatly outperform multilingual models up to +2.6% BLEU in WMT 2019 French-German and German-Czech tasks. We show that our improvements are valid also in zero-shot/zero-resource scenarios.