Question: Is it common to have source and assisting languages with different word order in a practical setting?
Evidence: Deep Learning approaches have achieved impressive results on various NLP tasks BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 and have become the de facto approach for any NLP task. However, these deep learning techniques have found to be less effective for low-resource languages when the available training data is very less BIBREF3 . Recently, several approaches like Multi-task learning BIBREF4 , multilingual learning BIBREF5 , semi-supervised learning BIBREF2 , BIBREF6 and transfer learning BIBREF7 , BIBREF3 have been explored by the deep learning community to overcome data sparsity in low-resource languages. Transfer learning trains a model for a parent task and fine-tunes the learned parent model weights (features) for a related child task BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 . This effectively reduces the requirement on training data for the child task as the model would have learned relevant features from the parent task data thereby, improving the performance on the child task.
Transfer learning has also been explored in the multilingual Neural Machine Translation BIBREF3 , BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 . The goal is to improve the NMT performance on the source to target language pair (child task) using an assisting source language (assisting to target translation is the parent task). Here, the parent model is trained on the assisting and target language parallel corpus and the trained weights are used to initialize the child model. The child model can now be fine-tuned on the source-target language pairs, if parallel corpus is available. The divergence between the source and the assisting language can adversely impact the benefits obtained from transfer learning. Multiple studies have shown that transfer learning works best when the languages are related BIBREF3 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF9 . Several studies have tried to address lexical divergence between the source and the target languages BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF12 . However, the effect of word order divergence and its mitigation has not been explored. In a practical setting, it is not uncommon to have source and assisting languages with different word order. For instance, it is possible to find parallel corpora between English and some Indian languages, but very little parallel corpora between Indian languages. Hence, it is natural to use English as an assisting language for inter-Indian language translation.
To see how word order divergence can be detrimental, let us consider the case of the standard RNN (Bi-LSTM) encoder-attention-decoder architecture BIBREF13 . The encoder generates contextual representations (annotation vectors) for each source word, which are used by the attention network to match the source words to the current decoder state. The contextual representation is word-order dependent. Hence, if the assisting and the source languages do not have similar word order the generated contextual representations will not be consistent. The attention network (and hence the decoder) sees different contextual representations for similar words in parallel sentences across different languages. This makes it difficult to transfer knowledge learned from the assisting language to the source language.
We illustrate this by visualizing the contextual representations generated by the encoder of an English to Hindi NMT system for two versions of the English input: (a) original word order (SVO) (b) word order of the source language (SOV, for Bengali). Figure FIGREF1 shows that the encoder representations obtained are very different. The attention network and the decoder now have to work with very different representations. Note that the plot below does not take into account further lexical and other divergences between source and assisting languages, since we demonstrated word order divergence with the same language on the source side.
To address this word order divergence, we propose to pre-order the assisting language sentences to match the word order of the source language. We consider an extremely resource constrained scenario, where we do not have any parallel corpus for the child task. We are limited to a bilingual dictionary for transfer information from the assisting to the source language. From our experiments, we show that there is a significant increase in the translation accuracy for the unseen source-target language pair.
In a practical setting, it is not uncommon to have source and assisting languages with different word order.
Answer: Yes, it is.