Being Generous with Sub-words towards Small NMT Children (2020)

In the context of under-resourced neural machine translation (NMT), transfer learning from an NMT model trained on a high resource language pair, or from a multilingual NMT (M-NMT) model, has been shown to boost performance to a large extent. In this paper, we focus on so-called cold start transfer learning from an M-NMT model, which means that the parent model is not trained on any of the child data. Such a set-up enables quick adaptation of M-NMT models to new languages. We investigate the effectiveness of cold start transfer learning from a many-to-many M-NMT model to an under-resourced child. We show that sufficiently large sub-word vocabularies should be used for transfer learning to be effective in such a scenario. When adopting relatively large sub-word vocabularies we observe increases in performance thanks to transfer learning from a parent M-NMT model, both when translating to and from the under-resourced language. Our proposed approach involving dynamic vocabularies is both practical and effective. We report results on two under-resourced language pairs, i.e. Icelandic-English and Irish-English