{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/rapid-adaptation-of-neural-machine","title":"Rapid Adaptation of Neural Machine Translation to New Languages","arxiv_id":"1808.04189","date":"2018-08-13","proceeding":"EMNLP 2018 10","authors":["Graham Neubig","Junjie Hu"],"abstract":"This paper examines the problem of adapting neural machine translation\nsystems to new, low-resourced languages (LRLs) as effectively and rapidly as\npossible. We propose methods based on starting with massively multilingual\n\"seed models\", which can be trained ahead-of-time, and then continuing training\non data related to the LRL. We contrast a number of strategies, leading to a\nnovel, simple, yet effective method of \"similar-language regularization\", where\nwe jointly train on both a LRL of interest and a similar high-resourced\nlanguage to prevent over-fitting to small LRL data. Experiments demonstrate\nthat massively multilingual models, even without any explicit adaptation, are\nsurprisingly effective, achieving BLEU scores of up to 15.5 with no data from\nthe LRL, and that the proposed similar-language regularization method improves\nover other adaptation methods by 1.7 BLEU points average over 4 LRL settings.\nCode to reproduce experiments at https://github.com/neubig/rapid-adaptation","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.04189v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.04189v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"rapid-adaptation-of-neural-machine","repo_url":"https://github.com/neubig/rapid-adaptation","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1808.04189","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}