Abstract
Unsupervised machine translation—i.e.,not assuming any cross-lingual supervisionsignal, whether a dictionary, translations,or comparable corpora—seems impossible,but nevertheless, Lample et al.(2018a) recently proposed a fully unsupervisedmachine translation (MT) model.The model relies heavily on an adversarial,unsupervised alignment of word embeddingspaces for bilingual dictionary induction(Conneau et al., 2018), which weexamine here. Our results identify the limitationsof current unsupervised MT: unsupervisedbilingual dictionary inductionperforms much worse on morphologicallyrich languages that are not dependent marking,when monolingual corpora from differentdomains or different embedding algorithmsare used. We show that a simpletrick, exploiting a weak supervision signalfrom identical words, enables more robustinduction, and establish a near-perfectcorrelation between unsupervised bilingualdictionary induction performance and a previouslyunexplored graph similarity metric
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics : (Long papers) |
| Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics |
| Publication date | 2018 |
| Pages | 778–788 |
| Publication status | Published - 2018 |
| Event | 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - System Demonstrations - Melbourne, Australia Duration: 15 Jul 2018 → 20 Jul 2018 |
Conference
| Conference | 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - System Demonstrations |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Australia |
| City | Melbourne |
| Period | 15/07/2018 → 20/07/2018 |