On the Limitations of Unsupervised Bilingual Dictionary Induction

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Unsupervised machine translation—i.e.,not assuming any cross-lingual supervisionsignal, whether a dictionary, translations,or comparable corpora—seems impossible,but nevertheless, Lample et al.(2018a) recently proposed a fully unsupervisedmachine translation (MT) model.The model relies heavily on an adversarial,unsupervised alignment of word embeddingspaces for bilingual dictionary induction(Conneau et al., 2018), which weexamine here. Our results identify the limitationsof current unsupervised MT: unsupervisedbilingual dictionary inductionperforms much worse on morphologicallyrich languages that are not dependent marking,when monolingual corpora from differentdomains or different embedding algorithmsare used. We show that a simpletrick, exploiting a weak supervision signalfrom identical words, enables more robustinduction, and establish a near-perfectcorrelation between unsupervised bilingualdictionary induction performance and a previouslyunexplored graph similarity metric
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics : (Long papers)
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Publication date2018
Pages778–788
Publication statusPublished - 2018
Event 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - System Demonstrations - Melbourne, Australia
Duration: 15 Jul 201820 Jul 2018

Conference

Conference 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - System Demonstrations
LandAustralia
ByMelbourne
Periode15/07/201820/07/2018

ID: 214756841