Zero Shot Translation
Zero-shot translation aims to enable machine translation between language pairs unseen during model training, significantly reducing the need for large parallel corpora for each language combination. Current research focuses on improving multilingual models, often leveraging transformer architectures, by employing techniques like decoupled vocabulary learning, disentangling semantic and linguistic features, and utilizing cross-lingual consistency regularization to enhance knowledge transfer and mitigate the "off-target" problem (incorrect language generation). These advancements hold significant potential for expanding machine translation capabilities to low-resource languages and facilitating cross-lingual communication in various applications, including text-to-image generation and multimodal translation.
Papers
Searching for Needles in a Haystack: On the Role of Incidental Bilingualism in PaLM's Translation Capability
Eleftheria Briakou, Colin Cherry, George Foster
Variable-length Neural Interlingua Representations for Zero-shot Neural Machine Translation
Zhuoyuan Mao, Haiyue Song, Raj Dabre, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi
Can Domains Be Transferred Across Languages in Multi-Domain Multilingual Neural Machine Translation?
Thuy-Trang Vu, Shahram Khadivi, Xuanli He, Dinh Phung, Gholamreza Haffari
SMaLL-100: Introducing Shallow Multilingual Machine Translation Model for Low-Resource Languages
Alireza Mohammadshahi, Vassilina Nikoulina, Alexandre Berard, Caroline Brun, James Henderson, Laurent Besacier