Papers › Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Weight Sharing

Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Weight Sharing

24 Apr 2018ACL 2018 7arXiv:1804.09057archive 2025-07-28

Zhen Yang, Wei Chen, Feng Wang, Bo Xu

Unsupervised neural machine translation (NMT) is a recently proposed approach for machine translation which aims to train the model without using any labeled data. The models proposed for unsupervised NMT often use only one shared encoder to map the pairs of sentences from different languages to a shared-latent space, which is weak in keeping the unique and internal characteristics of each language, such as the style, terminology, and sentence structure. To address this issue, we introduce an extension by utilizing two independent encoders but sharing some partial weights which are responsible for extracting high-level representations of the input sentences. Besides, two different generative adversarial networks (GANs), namely the local GAN and global GAN, are proposed to enhance the cross-language translation. With this new approach, we achieve significant improvements on English-German, English-French and Chinese-to-English translation tasks.

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Code

ZhenYangIACAS/unsupervised-NMT officialmentioned in papertf report

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Tasks

Machine TranslationNMTSentenceTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Machine Translation WMT2016 English-German Unsupervised NMT + weight-sharing BLEU score 10.86 #10 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Machine Translation WMT2016 German-English Unsupervised NMT + weight-sharing BLEU score 14.62 #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Convolution

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