Question: Why have many methods been proposed to improve the performance of UNMT in recent?
Evidence: In recent years, zero-shot translation in NMT has attracted widespread attention in academic research. Existing methods are mainly divided into four categories: pivot-based method, transfer learning, multilingual NMT, and unsupervised NMT.
Pivot-based Method is a common strategy to obtain a source$\rightarrow $target model by introducing a pivot language. This approach is further divided into pivoting and pivot-synthetic. While the former firstly translates a source language into the pivot language which is later translated to the target language BIBREF4, BIBREF5, BIBREF12, the latter trains a source$\rightarrow $target model with pseudo data generated from source-pivot or pivot-target parallel data BIBREF13, BIBREF14. Although the pivot-based methods can achieve not bad performance, it always falls into a computation-expensive and parameter-vast dilemma of quadratic growth in the number of source languages, and suffers from the error propagation problem BIBREF15.
Transfer Learning is firstly introduced for NMT by BIBREF6, which leverages a high-resource parent model to initialize the low-resource child model. On this basis, BIBREF7 and BIBREF8 use shared vocabularies for source/target language to improve transfer learning, while BIBREF16 relieve the vocabulary mismatch by mainly using cross-lingual word embedding. Although these methods are successful in the low-resource scene, they have limited effects in zero-shot translation.
Multilingual NMT (MNMT) enables training a single model that supports translation from multiple source languages into multiple target languages, even those unseen language pairs BIBREF17, BIBREF18, BIBREF19, BIBREF20, BIBREF21. Aside from simpler deployment, MNMT benefits from transfer learning where low-resource language pairs are trained together with high-resource ones. However, BIBREF22 point out that MNMT for zero-shot translation easily fails, and is sensitive to the hyper-parameter setting. Also, MNMT usually performs worse than the pivot-based method in zero-shot translation setting BIBREF23.
Unsupervised NMT (UNMT) considers a harder setting, in which only large-scale monolingual corpora are available for training. Recently, many methods have been proposed to improve the performance of UNMT, including using denoising auto-encoder, statistic machine translation (SMT) and unsupervised pre-training BIBREF24, BIBREF25, BIBREF26, BIBREF11. Since UNMT performs well between similar languages (e.g., English-German translation), its performance between distant languages is still far from expectation.
Our proposed method belongs to the transfer learning, but it is different from traditional transfer methods which train a parent model as starting point. Before training a parent model, our approach fully leverages cross-lingual pre-training methods to make all source languages share the same feature space and thus enables a smooth transition for zero-shot translation.
Recently, many methods have been proposed to improve the performance of UNMT, including using denoising auto-encoder, statistic machine translation (SMT) and unsupervised pre-training (Artetxe et al. 2017;   Lample et al. 2018;   Ren et al. 2019;   Lample and Conneau 2019).   Since UNMT performs well between similar languages (e.g., English-German translation), its performance between distant languages is still far from expectation.
Answer: Since UNMT performs well between similar languages (e.g., English-German translation), its performance between distant languages is still far from expectation.