Mirror-Generative Neural Machine Translation

Zaixiang Zheng, Hao Zhou, Shujian Huang, Lei Li, Xin-Yu Dai, Jiajun Chen

Abstract: Training neural machine translation models (NMT) requires a large amount of parallel corpus, which is scarce for many language pairs. However, raw non-parallel corpora are often easy to obtain. Existing approaches have not exploited the full potential of non-parallel bilingual data either in training or decoding. In this paper, we propose the mirror-generative NMT (MGNMT), a single unified architecture that simultaneously integrates the source to target translation model, the target to source translation model, and two language models. Both translation models and language models share the same latent semantic space, therefore both translation directions can learn from non-parallel data more effectively. Besides, the translation models and language models can collaborate together during decoding. Our experiments show that the proposed MGNMT consistently outperforms existing approaches in a variety of scenarios and language pairs, including resource-rich and low-resource situations.

Keywords: neural machine translation, generative model, mirror

Code: https://github.com/zhengzx-nlp/MGNMT