Multilingual Machine Translation: Deep Analysis of Language-Specific Encoder-Decoders

State-of-the-art multilingual machine translation relies on a shared encoder-decoder. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach based on language-specific encoder-decoders, which can be easily extended to new languages by learning their corresponding modules. To establish a common interlingu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of artificial intelligence research Vol. 73; pp. 1535 - 1552
Main Authors: Escolano, Carlos, Ruiz Costa-jussà, Marta, R. Fonollosa, José A.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: San Francisco AI Access Foundation 01.01.2022
Subjects:
Artificial intelligence
Coders
Encoders-Decoders
Languages
Lifelong learning
Machine translation
Modular systems
Modules
Multilingualism
ISSN:1076-9757, 1076-9757, 1943-5037
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:State-of-the-art multilingual machine translation relies on a shared encoder-decoder. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach based on language-specific encoder-decoders, which can be easily extended to new languages by learning their corresponding modules. To establish a common interlingua representation, we simultaneously train N initial languages. Our experiments show that the proposed approach improves over the shared encoder-decoder for the initial languages and when adding new languages, without the need to retrain the remaining modules. All in all, our work closes the gap between shared and language-specific encoder-decoders, advancing toward modular multilingual machine translation systems that can be flexibly extended in lifelong learning settings.
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ISSN:1076-9757
1076-9757
1943-5037
DOI:10.1613/jair.1.12699