EBBS: An Ensemble with Bi-Level Beam Search for Zero-Shot Machine Translation

arXiv:2403.00144v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The ability of zero-shot translation emerges when we train a multilingual model with certain translation directions; the model can then directly translate in unseen directions. Alternatively, zero-shot translation can be accomplished by pivoting through a third language (e.g., English). In our work, we observe that both direct and pivot translations are noisy and achieve less satisfactory performance. We propose EBBS, an ensemble method with a novel bi-level beam search algorithm, where each ensemble component explores …

abstract arxiv cs.ai cs.cl cs.lg english ensemble language machine machine translation multilingual observe pivoting search through train translate translation type work zero-shot