Title: Evaluating the Cross-Lingual Effectiveness of Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Aditya Siddhant, Melvin Johnson, Henry Tsai, Naveen Arivazhagan, Jason Riesa, Ankur Bapna, Orhan Firat, Karthik Raman
Published: 1st September 2019 (Sunday) @ 17:32:21
Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/1909.00437v1
Abstract
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. 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), in different cross-lingual transfer learning scenarios and show gains in zero-shot transfer in 4 out of these 5 tasks.