Skip to main content

Incorporating Typological Features into Language Selection for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Web and Big Data (APWeb-WAIM 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12858))

  • 1463 Accesses

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to use rich semantic and typological information of languages to improve the language selection method for multilingual NMT. In particular, we first use a graph-based model to output the most semantic similarity languages; then, a random forest model is built which integrates features such as data size, language family, word formation, morpheme overlap, word order, POS tag and syntax similarity together to predict the final target language(s). Experimental results on several datasets show that our method achieves consistent improvements over existing approaches both on language selection and multilingual NMT.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.ethnologue.com/.

  2. 2.

    https://iwslt.org/.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/moses-smt/mosesdecoder.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/neubig/kytea.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/fxsjy/jieba.

References

  1. Alaux, J., Grave, E., Cuturi, M., Joulin, A.: Unsupervised hyperalignment for multilingual word embeddings. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.01124 (2018)

  2. Belinkov, Y., Màrquez, L., Sajjad, H., Durrani, N., Dalvi, F., Glass, J.: Evaluating layers of representation in neural machine translation on part-of-speech and semantic tagging tasks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.07772 (2018)

  3. Burges, C.J.: From RankNet to LambdaRank to LambdaMart: an overview. Learning 11(23–581), 81 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Eger, S., Hoenen, A., Mehler, A.: Language classification from bilingual word embedding graphs. arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.05014 (2016)

  5. Hammarström, H.: Linguistic diversity and language evolution. J. Lang. Evol. 1(1), 19–29 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Järvelin, K., Kekäläinen, J.: Cumulated gain-based evaluation of IR techniques. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. (TOIS) 20(4), 422–446 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Johnson, M., et al.: Google’s multilingual neural machine translation system: enabling zero-shot translation. Trans. Assoc. Comput. Linguist. 5, 339–351 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Ke, G., et al.: LightGBM: a highly efficient gradient boosting decision tree. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 30, 3146–3154 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Khurana, D., Koli, A., Khatter, K., Singh, S.: Natural language processing: state of the art, current trends and challenges. arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.05148 (2017)

  10. Kim, Y.B.: Universal morphological analysis using structured nearest neighbor prediction (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Kingma, D.P., Ba, J.: Adam: a method for stochastic optimization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6980 (2014)

  12. Lin, Y.H., et al.: Choosing transfer languages for cross-lingual learning. In: Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 3125–3135, July 2019

    Google Scholar 

  13. Littell, P., Mortensen, D.R., Lin, K., Kairis, K., Turner, C., Levin, L.: URIEL and lang2vec: representing languages as typological, geographical, and phylogenetic vectors. In: Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, vol. 2, Short Papers, pp. 8–14 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Naseem, T., Snyder, B., Eisenstein, J., Barzilay, R.: Multilingual part-of-speech tagging: two unsupervised approaches. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 36, 341–385 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Papineni, K., Roukos, S., Ward, T., Zhu, W.J.: BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 311–318 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Sennrich, R., Haddow, B., Birch, A.: Improving neural machine translation models with monolingual data. arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06709 (2015)

  17. Song, L., Gildea, D., Zhang, Y., Wang, Z., Su, J.: Semantic neural machine translation using AMR. Trans. Assoc. Comput. Linguist. 7, 19–31 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Tan, X., Chen, J., He, D., Xia, Y., Qin, T., Liu, T.Y.: Multilingual neural machine translation with language clustering. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.09324 (2019)

  19. Vaswani, A., et al.: Attention is all you need. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03762 (2017)

  20. Wang, Y., Zhou, L., Zhang, J., Zhai, F., Xu, J., Zong, C.: A compact and language-sensitive multilingual translation method. In: Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1213–1223 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Wu, Y., et al.: Google’s neural machine translation system: bridging the gap between human and machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.08144 (2016)

Download references

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61906158).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chenggang Mi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Mi, C., Zhu, S., Fan, Y., Xie, L. (2021). Incorporating Typological Features into Language Selection for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation. In: U, L.H., Spaniol, M., Sakurai, Y., Chen, J. (eds) Web and Big Data. APWeb-WAIM 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12858. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85896-4_27

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85896-4_27

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-85895-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-85896-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics