Improving Multilingual Neural Machine Translation For Low-Resource Languages: French, English - Vietnamese

AbstractPrior works have demonstrated that a low-resource language pair can benefit from multilingual machine translation (MT) systems, which rely on many language pairs’ joint training. This paper proposes two simple strategies to address the rare word issue in multilingual MT systems for two low-resource language pairs: French-Vietnamese and English-Vietnamese. The first strategy is about dynamical learning word similarity of tokens in the shared space among source languages while another one attempts to augment the translation ability of rare words through updating their embeddings during the training. Besides, we leverage monolingual data for multilingual MT systems to increase the amount of synthetic parallel corpora while dealing with the data sparsity problem. We have shown significant improvements of up to +1.62 and +2.54 BLEU points over the bilingual baseline systems for both language pairs and released our datasets for the research community.