Shaonan Zhang


2018

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A neural interlingua for multilingual machine translation
Yichao Lu | Phillip Keung | Faisal Ladhak | Vikas Bhardwaj | Shaonan Zhang | Jason Sun
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Research Papers

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.