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Word Translation Without Parallel Data (arxiv.org)
2 points by kawera on Mar 19, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It matches the word-meaning maps of two languages by lining up their shapes, needing no shared words, paired sentences, or dictionaries. The resulting translations beat methods that use bilingual dictionaries on some language pairs, even for distant ones like English and Chinese.

Abstract

State-of-the-art methods for learning cross-lingual word embeddings have relied on bilingual dictionaries or parallel corpora. Recent studies showed that the need for parallel data supervision can be alleviated with character-level information. While these methods showed encouraging results, they are not on par with their supervised counterparts and are limited to pairs of languages sharing a common alphabet. In this work, we show that we can build a bilingual dictionary between two languages without using any parallel corpora, by aligning monolingual word embedding spaces in an unsupervised way. Without using any character information, our model even outperforms existing supervised methods on cross-lingual tasks for some language pairs. Our experiments demonstrate that our method works very well also for distant language pairs, like English-Russian or English-Chinese. We finally describe experiments on the English-Esperanto low-resource language pair, on which there only exists a limited amount of parallel data, to show the potential impact of our method in fully unsupervised machine translation. Our code, embeddings and dictionaries are publicly available.

Alexis Conneau, Guillaume Lample, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, Ludovic Denoyer, Hervé Jégou
arXiv:1710.04087 · cs.CL · submitted Oct 11, 2017 · updated Jan 30, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · ICLR 2018

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