Paper ID: 2202.12814

The Reality of Multi-Lingual Machine Translation

Tom Kocmi, Dominik Macháček, Ondřej Bojar

Our book "The Reality of Multi-Lingual Machine Translation" discusses the benefits and perils of using more than two languages in machine translation systems. While focused on the particular task of sequence-to-sequence processing and multi-task learning, the book targets somewhat beyond the area of natural language processing. Machine translation is for us a prime example of deep learning applications where human skills and learning capabilities are taken as a benchmark that many try to match and surpass. We document that some of the gains observed in multi-lingual translation may result from simpler effects than the assumed cross-lingual transfer of knowledge. In the first, rather general part, the book will lead you through the motivation for multi-linguality, the versatility of deep neural networks especially in sequence-to-sequence tasks to complications of this learning. We conclude the general part with warnings against too optimistic and unjustified explanations of the gains that neural networks demonstrate. In the second part, we fully delve into multi-lingual models, with a particularly careful examination of transfer learning as one of the more straightforward approaches utilizing additional languages. The recent multi-lingual techniques, including massive models, are surveyed and practical aspects of deploying systems for many languages are discussed. The conclusion highlights the open problem of machine understanding and reminds of two ethical aspects of building large-scale models: the inclusivity of research and its ecological trace.

Submitted: Feb 25, 2022