{"id":869667,"date":"2022-08-12T16:38:52","date_gmt":"2022-08-12T23:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/"},"modified":"2022-08-15T08:56:24","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T15:56:24","slug":"language-tokens-a-frustratingly-simple-approach-improves-zero-shot-performance-of-multilingual-translation","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/language-tokens-a-frustratingly-simple-approach-improves-zero-shot-performance-of-multilingual-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"Language Tokens: A Frustratingly Simple Approach Improves Zero-Shot Performance of Multilingual Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This paper proposes a simple yet effective method to improve direct (X-to-Y) translation for both cases: zero-shot and when direct data is available. We modify the input tokens at both the encoder and decoder to include signals for the source and target languages. We show a performance gain when training from scratch, or finetuning a pretrained model with the proposed setup. In the experiments, our method shows nearly 10.0 BLEU points gain on in-house datasets depending on the checkpoint selection criteria.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This paper proposes a simple yet effective method to improve direct (X-to-Y) translation for both cases: zero-shot and when direct data is available. We modify the input tokens at both the encoder and decoder to include signals for the source and target languages. We show a performance gain when training from scratch, or finetuning a 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