Blog
The latest news from Google AI
Exploring Massively Multilingual, Massive Neural Machine Translation
Friday, October 11, 2019
Posted by Ankur Bapna, Software Engineer and Orhan Firat, Research Scientist, Google Research
“... perhaps the way [of translation] is to descend, from each language, down to the common base of human communication — the real but as yet undiscovered universal language — and then re-emerge by whatever particular route is convenient.”
—
Warren Weaver
, 1949
Over the last few years there has been enormous progress in the quality of machine translation (MT) systems, breaking language barriers around the world thanks to the developments in
neural machine translation
(NMT). The success of NMT however, owes largely to the great amounts of supervised training data. But what about languages where data is scarce, or even absent? Multilingual NMT, with the inductive bias that “
the learning signal from one language should benefit the quality of translation to other languages”,
is a potential remedy.
Multilingual machine translation processes multiple languages using a single translation model. The success of multilingual training for data-scarce languages has been demonstrated for
automatic speech recognition
and
text-to-speech
systems, and by prior research on multilingual translation [
1
,
2
,
3
]. We previously studied the effect of
scaling up the number of languages
that can be learned in a single neural network, while controlling the amount of training data per language. But what happens once all constraints are removed? Can we train a single model using all of the available data, despite the huge differences across languages in data size, scripts, complexity and domains?
In “
Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Wild: Findings and Challenges
” and follow-up papers [
4
,
5
,
6
,
7
], we push the limits of research on multilingual NMT by training a single NMT model on 25+ billion sentence pairs, from 100+ languages to and from English, with 50+ billion parameters. The result is an approach for massively multilingual, massive neural machine translation (M4) that demonstrates large quality improvements on both low- and high-resource languages and can be easily adapted to individual domains/languages, while showing great efficacy on cross-lingual downstream transfer tasks.
Massively Multilingual Machine Translation
Though data skew across language-pairs is a
great challenge in NMT
, it also creates an ideal scenario in which to study
transfer
, where insights gained through training on one language can be applied to the translation of other languages. On one end of the distribution, there are high-resource languages like French, German and Spanish where there are billions of parallel examples, while on the other end, supervised data for low-resource languages such as Yoruba, Sindhi and Hawaiian, is limited to a few tens of thousands.
The data distribution over all language pairs (in log scale) and the relative translation quality (
BLEU score
) of the bilingual baselines trained on each one of these specific language pairs.
Once trained using all of the available data (25+ billion examples from 103 languages), we observe strong
positive transfer
towards low-resource languages, dramatically improving the translation quality of 30+ languages at the tail of the distribution by an average of 5
BLEU
points. This effect is
already known
, but surprisingly encouraging, considering the comparison is between bilingual baselines (i.e., models trained only on specific language pairs) and a single multilingual model with
representational capacity
similar to a single bilingual model. This finding hints that massively multilingual models are effective at generalization, and capable of capturing the representational similarity across a large body of languages.
Translation quality comparison of a single massively multilingual model against bilingual baselines that are trained for each one of the 103 language pairs.
In our EMNLP’19 paper [
5
], we compare the representations of multilingual models across different languages. We find that multilingual models learn shared representations for
linguistically similar languages
without the need for external constraints, validating
long-standing intuitions
and empirical results that
exploit these similarities
. In [
6
], we further demonstrate the effectiveness of these learned representations on cross-lingual transfer on downstream tasks.
Visualization of the clustering of the encoded representations of all 103 languages, based on representational similarity. Languages are color-coded by their
linguistic family
.
Building Massive Neural Networks
As we increase the number of low-resource languages in the model, the quality of high-resource language translations starts to decline. This regression is
recognized
in multi-task setups, arising from inter-task competition and the unidirectional nature of transfer (i.e., from high- to low-resource)
.
While working on
better learning
and
capacity control
algorithms to mitigate this
negative transfer
, we also extend the representational capacity of our neural networks by making them bigger by increasing the number of model parameters to improve the quality of translation for high-resource languages.
Numerous design choices can be made to scale neural network capacity, including adding more layers or making the hidden representations wider. Continuing
our study
on training deeper networks for translation, we utilized
GPipe
[
4
] to train 128-layer
Transformers
with over 6 billion parameters. Increasing the model capacity resulted in significantly improved performance across all languages by an average of 5
BLEU
points. We also studied other properties of very deep networks, including the
depth-width trade-off
, trainability challenges and design choices for scaling Transformers to over 1500 layers with 84 billion parameters.
While scaling depth is one approach to increasing model capacity, exploring architectures that can exploit the multi-task nature of the problem is a very plausible complementary way forward. By modifying the Transformer architecture through the substitution of the vanilla feed-forward layers with
sparsely-gated mixture of experts
, we drastically scale up the model capacity, allowing us to successfully train and pass 50 billion parameters, which further improved translation quality across the board.
Translation quality improvement of a single massively multilingual model as we increase the capacity (number of parameters) compared to 103 individual bilingual baselines.
Making M4 Practical
It is inefficient to train large models with extremely high computational costs for every individual language, domain or transfer task. Instead, we present methods [
7
] to make these models more practical by using capacity tunable layers to adapt a new model to specific languages or domains, without altering the original.
Next Steps
At least half of the 7,000 languages currently spoken will no longer exist by the end of this century
*
. Can multilingual machine translation come to the rescue? We see the M4 approach as a stepping stone towards serving the next 1,000 languages; starting from such multilingual models will allow us to easily extend to new languages, domains and down-stream tasks, even when parallel data is unavailable. Indeed the path is rocky, and on the road to universal MT many promising solutions appear to be interdisciplinary. This makes multilingual NMT a plausible test bed for machine learning practitioners and theoreticians interested in exploring the annals of multi-task learning, meta-learning, training dynamics of deep nets and much more. We still have a long way to go.
Acknowledgements
This effort is built on contributions from Naveen Arivazhagan, Dmitry Lepikhin, Melvin Johnson, Maxim Krikun, Mia Chen, Yuan Cao, Yanping Huang, Sneha Kudugunta, Isaac Caswell, Aditya Siddhant, Wei Wang, Roee Aharoni, Sébastien Jean, George Foster, Colin Cherry, Wolfgang Macherey, Zhifeng Chen and Yonghui Wu. We would also like to acknowledge support from the Google Translate, Brain, and Lingvo development teams, Jakob Uszkoreit, Noam Shazeer, Hyouk Joong Lee, Dehao Chen, Youlong Cheng, David Grangier, Colin Raffel, Katherine Lee, Thang Luong, Geoffrey Hinton, Manisha Jain, Pendar Yousefi and Macduff Hughes.
*
The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages (Austin and Sallabank, 2011).
↩
Labels
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
AI
AI for Social Good
Algorithms
Android
Android Wear
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Art
Audio
Augmented Reality
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
AutoML
Awards
BigQuery
Cantonese
Chemistry
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Compression
Computational Imaging
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
Data Discovery
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
DeepDream
DeepMind
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
electronics
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Europe
Exacycle
Expander
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Gboard
Gmail
Google Accelerated Science
Google Books
Google Brain
Google Cloud Platform
Google Docs
Google Drive
Google Genomics
Google Maps
Google Photos
Google Play Apps
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Trips
Google Voice Search
Google+
Government
grants
Graph
Graph Mining
Hardware
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICCV
ICLR
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
India
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
Kaggle
KDD
Keyboard Input
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Low-Light Photography
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Perception
Machine Translation
Magenta
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
Mixed Reality
ML
ML Fairness
MOOC
Moore's Law
Multimodal Learning
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
NeurIPS
Nexus
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
On-device Learning
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
optimization
osdi
osdi10
patents
Peer Review
ph.d. fellowship
PhD Fellowship
PhotoScan
Physics
PiLab
Pixel
Policy
Professional Development
Proposals
Public Data Explorer
publication
Publications
Quantum AI
Quantum Computing
Recommender Systems
Reinforcement Learning
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Robotics
schema.org
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
Self-Supervised Learning
Semantic Models
Semi-supervised Learning
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Social Networks
Software
Sound Search
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Style Transfer
Supervised Learning
Systems
TensorBoard
TensorFlow
TPU
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
Unsupervised Learning
User Experience
video
Video Analysis
Virtual Reality
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
Year in Review
YouTube
Archive
2020
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2019
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Follow @googleai
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
