Word Translation Without Parallel Data
Authors: Alexis Conneau, Guillaume Lample, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, Ludovic Denoyer, Hervé Jégou
AI-generated Key Points
- Traditional methods for learning cross-lingual word embeddings rely on bilingual dictionaries or parallel corpora
- Recent studies have shown that character-level information can reduce the need for parallel data supervision
- Character-based methods still fall short compared to supervised approaches and are limited to language pairs with a common alphabet
- The authors propose a novel approach that builds a bilingual dictionary between two languages without using any parallel corpora
- Their model outperforms existing supervised methods on cross-lingual tasks for certain language pairs without utilizing character information
- Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of their method for distant language pairs such as English-Russian or English-Chinese
- Experiments conducted on the low-resource language pair of English-Esperanto showcase potential impact in fully unsupervised machine translation
- Code, embeddings, and dictionaries developed by the authors are publicly available for further research and exploration
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.
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