Evaluating the Cross-Lingual Effectiveness of Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

2020-06-02

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34

Volume

Vol. 34 No. 05: AAAI-20 Technical Tracks 5

AAAI Technical Track: Natural Language Processing

The recently proposed massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) system has been shown to be capable of translating over 100 languages to and from English within a single model (Aharoni, Johnson, and Firat 2019). Its improved translation performance on low resource languages hints at potential cross-lingual transfer capability for downstream tasks. In this paper, we evaluate the cross-lingual effectiveness of representations from the encoder of a massively multilingual NMT model on 5 downstream classification and sequence labeling tasks covering a diverse set of over 50 languages. We compare against a strong baseline, multilingual BERT (mBERT) (Devlin et al. 2018), in different cross-lingual transfer learning scenarios and show gains in zero-shot transfer in 4 out of these 5 tasks.

10.1609/aaai.v34i05.6414