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arXiv · 1909.01146

Bilingual is At Least Monolingual (BALM): A Novel Translation Algorithm that Encodes Monolingual Priors

Jeffrey Cheng·Chris Callison-Burch
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Abstract

State-of-the-art machine translation (MT) models do not use knowledge of any single language's structure; this is the equivalent of asking someone to translate from English to German while knowing neither language. BALM is a framework incorporates monolingual priors into an MT pipeline; by casting input and output languages into embedded space using BERT, we can solve machine translation with much simpler models. We find that English-to-German translation on the Multi30k dataset can be solved with a simple feedforward network under the BALM framework with near-SOTA BLEU scores.

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Jeffrey Cheng, Chris Callison-Burch. 2019-08-30. Bilingual is At Least Monolingual (BALM): A Novel Translation Algorithm that Encodes Monolingual Priors. https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01146

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