Papers › Bilingual is At Least Monolingual (BALM): A Novel Translation Algorithm that Encodes...

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

30 Aug 2019arXiv:1909.01146archive 2025-07-28

Jeffrey Cheng, Chris Callison-Burch

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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Machine TranslationTranslation

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutFeedforward NetworkLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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