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Title: Word translation without parallel data

Paper content:
State-of-the-art methods for learning cross-lingual word embeddings have relied on bilingual dictionaries or parallel corpora.
Recent studies showed that the need for parallel data supervision can be alleviated with character-level information.
While these methods showed encouraging results, they are not on par with their supervised counterparts and are limited to pairs of languages sharing a common alphabet.
In this work, we show that we can build a bilingual dictionary between two languages without using any parallel corpora, by aligning monolingual word embedding spaces in an unsupervised way.
Without using any character information, our model even outperforms existing supervised methods on cross-lingual tasks for some language pairs.
Our experiments demonstrate that our method works very well also for distant language pairs, like English-Russian or English-Chinese.
We finally describe experiments on the English-Esperanto low-resource language pair, on which there only exists a limited amount of parallel data, to show the potential impact of our method in fully unsupervised machine translation.
Our code, embeddings and dictionaries are publicly available.
Most successful methods for learning distributed representations of words (e.g. BID32 a) ; BID34 ; ) rely on the distributional hypothesis of BID20 , which states that words occurring in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings.
BID28 show that the skip-gram with negative sampling method of BID32 amounts to factorizing a word-context co-occurrence matrix, whose entries are the pointwise mutual information of the respective word and context pairs.
Exploiting word cooccurrence statistics leads to word vectors that reflect the semantic similarities and dissimilarities: similar words are close in the embedding space and conversely.
BID31 first noticed that continuous word embedding spaces exhibit similar structures across languages, even when considering distant language pairs like English and Vietnamese.
They proposed to exploit this similarity by learning a linear mapping from a source to a target embedding space.
They employed a parallel vocabulary of five thousand words as anchor points to learn this mapping and evaluated their approach on a word translation task.
Since then, several studies aimed at improving these cross-lingual word embeddings BID12 ; BID47 ; ; BID0 ; BID1 ; BID43 ), but they all rely on bilingual word lexicons.Recent attempts at reducing the need for bilingual supervision BID43 employ identical character strings to form a parallel vocabulary.
The iterative method of BID2 gradually aligns embedding spaces, starting from a parallel vocabulary of aligned digits.
These methods are however limited to similar languages sharing a common alphabet, such as European languages.
Some recent methods explored distribution-based approach BID7 or adversarial training BID50 to obtain cross-lingual word embeddings without any parallel data.
While these approaches sound appealing, their performance is significantly below supervised methods.
To sum up, current methods have either not reached competitive performance, or they still require parallel data, such as aligned corpora BID18 BID46 or a seed parallel lexicon BID11 .In
this paper, we introduce a model that either is on par, or outperforms supervised state-of-the-art methods, without employing any cross-lingual annotated data. We
only use two large monolingual corpora, one in the source and one in the target language. Our
method leverages adversarial training to learn a linear mapping from a source to a target space and operates in two steps. First
, in a twoplayer game, a discriminator is trained to distinguish between the mapped source embeddings and the target embeddings, while the mapping (which can be seen as a generator) is jointly trained to fool the discriminator. Second
, we extract a synthetic dictionary from the resulting shared embedding space and fine-tune the mapping with the closed-form Procrustes solution from BID42 . Since
the method is unsupervised, cross-lingual data can not be used to select the best model. To overcome
this issue, we introduce an unsupervised selection metric that is highly correlated with the mapping quality and that we use both as a stopping criterion and to select the best hyper-parameters.In summary, this paper makes the following main contributions:• We present an unsupervised approach that reaches or outperforms state-of-the-art supervised approaches on several language pairs and on three different evaluation tasks, namely word translation, sentence translation retrieval, and cross-lingual word similarity. On a standard
word translation retrieval benchmark, using 200k vocabularies, our method reaches 66.2% accuracy on English-Italian while the best supervised approach is at 63.7%.• We introduce
a cross-domain similarity adaptation to mitigate the so-called hubness problem (points tending to be nearest neighbors of many points in high-dimensional spaces). It is inspired
by the self-tuning method from BID48 , but adapted to our two-domain scenario in which we must consider a bi-partite graph for neighbors. This approach
significantly improves the absolute performance, and outperforms the state of the art both in supervised and unsupervised setups on word-translation benchmarks.• We propose an
unsupervised criterion that is highly correlated with the quality of the mapping, that can be used both as a stopping criterion and to select the best hyper-parameters.• We release high-quality
dictionaries for 12 oriented languages pairs, as well as the corresponding supervised and unsupervised word embeddings.• We demonstrate the effectiveness
of our method using an example of a low-resource language pair where parallel corpora are not available (English-Esperanto) for which our method is particularly suited.The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes our unsupervised
approach with adversarial training and our refinement procedure. We then present our training procedure
with unsupervised model selection in Section 3. We report in Section 4 our results on
several cross-lingual tasks for several language pairs and compare our approach to supervised methods. Finally, we explain how our approach
differs from recent related work on learning cross-lingual word embeddings.
In what follows, we present the results on word translation retrieval using our bilingual dictionaries in Table 1 and our comparison to previous work in TAB1 where we significantly outperform previous approaches.
We also present results on the sentence translation retrieval task in TAB3 and the cross-lingual word similarity task in Table 4 .
Finally, we present results on word-by-word translation for English-Esperanto in Table 5 .Baselines
In our experiments, we consider a supervised baseline that uses the solution of the Procrustes formula given in (2), and trained on a dictionary of 5,000 source words. This baseline
can be combined with different similarity measures: NN for nearest neighbor similarity, ISF for Inverted SoftMax and the CSLS approach described in Section 2.2.Cross-domain similarity local scaling This approach has a single parameter K defining the size of the neighborhood. The performance
is very stable and therefore K does not need cross-validation: the results are essentially the same for K = 5, 10 and 50, therefore we set K = 10 in all experiments.In Table 1 provides a strong and robust gain in performance across all language pairs, with up to 7.2% in eneo. We observe that
Procrustes-CSLS is almost systematically better than Procrustes-ISF, while being computationally faster and not requiring hyper-parameter tuning. In TAB1 , we compare
our Procrustes-CSLS approach to previous models presented in BID31 ; ; Smith et al. FORMULA0 ; BID2 on the English-Italian word translation task, on which state-of-the-art models have been already compared. We show that our Procrustes-CSLS
approach obtains an accuracy of 44.9%, outperforming all previous approaches. In TAB3 , we also obtain a strong
gain in accuracy in the Italian-English sentence retrieval task using CSLS, from 53.5% to 69.5%, outperforming previous approaches by an absolute gain of more than 20%.Impact of the monolingual embeddings
For the word translation task, we obtained a significant boost in performance when considering fastText embeddings trained on Wikipedia, as opposed to previously used CBOW embeddings trained on the WaCky datasets BID3 ), as can been seen in TAB1 . Among the two factors of variation,
we noticed that this boost in performance was mostly due to the change in corpora. The fastText embeddings, which incorporates
more syntactic information about the words, obtained only two percent more accuracy compared to CBOW embeddings trained on the same corpus, out of the 18.8% gain. We hypothesize that this gain is due to the
similar co-occurrence statistics of Wikipedia corpora. Figure 3 in the appendix shows results on the
alignment of different monolingual embeddings and concurs with this hypothesis. We also obtained better results for monolingual
evaluation tasks such as word similarities and word analogies when training our embeddings on the Wikipedia corpora.Adversarial approach Table 1 shows that the adversarial approach provides a strong system for learning cross-lingual embeddings without parallel data. On the es-en and en-fr language pairs, Adv-CSLS
obtains a P@1 of 79.7% and 77.8%, which is only 3.2% and 3.3% below the supervised approach. Additionally, we observe that most systems still
obtain decent results on distant languages that do not share a common alphabet (en-ru and en-zh), for which method exploiting identical character strings are just not applicable BID2 ). This method allows us to build a strong synthetic
vocabulary using similarities obtained with CSLS. The gain in absolute accuracy observed with CSLS
on the Procrustes method is even more important here, with differences between Adv-NN and Adv-CSLS of up to 8.4% on es-en. As a simple baseline, we tried to match the first
two moments of the projected source and target embeddings, which amounts to solving DISPLAYFORM0 and solving the sign ambiguity BID45 . This attempt was not successful, which we explain
by the fact that this method tries to align only the first two moments, while adversarial training matches all the moments and can learn to focus on specific areas of the distributions instead of considering global statistics.Refinement: closing the gap with supervised approaches The refinement step on the synthetic bilingual vocabulary constructed after adversarial training brings an additional and significant gain in performance, closing the gap between our approach and the supervised baseline. In Table 1 , we observe that our unsupervised method
even outperforms our strong supervised baseline on en-it and en-es, and is able to retrieve the correct translation of a source word with up to 83% accuracy. The better performance of the unsupervised approach
can be explained by the strong similarity of cooccurrence statistics between the languages, and by the limitation in the supervised approach that uses a pre-defined fixed-size vocabulary (of 5,000 unique source words): in our case the refinement step can potentially use more anchor points. In TAB3 , we also observe a strong gain in accuracy
Table 4 : Cross-lingual wordsim task. NASARI (Camacho-Collados et al. FORMULA0 ) refers to
the official SemEval2017 baseline. We report Pearson correlation.en-eo eo-en Dictionary
-NN 6.1 11.9 Dictionary -CSLS 11.1 14.3 Table 5 : BLEU score on English-Esperanto. Although being a naive approach, word-byword translation
is enough to get a rough idea of the input sentence. The quality of the generated dictionary has a significant
impact on the BLEU score.(up to 15%) on sentence retrieval using bag-of-words embeddings
, which is consistent with the gain observed on the word retrieval task.Application to a low-resource language pair and to machine translation Our method is particularly suited for low-resource languages for which there only exists a very limited amount of parallel data. We apply it to the English-Esperanto language pair. We use the
fastText embeddings trained on Wikipedia, and create
a dictionary based on an online lexicon. The performance of our unsupervised approach on English-Esperanto
is of 28.2%, compared to 29.3% with the supervised method. On Esperanto-English, our unsupervised approach obtains 25.6%, which
is 1.3% better than the supervised method. The dictionary we use for that language pair does not take into account
the polysemy of words, which explains why the results are lower than on other language pairs. People commonly report the P@5 to alleviate this issue. In particular,
the P@5 for English-Esperanto and Esperanto-English is
of 46.5% and 43.9% respectively.To show the impact of such a dictionary on machine translation, we apply it to the English-Esperanto Tatoeba corpora BID44 . We remove all pairs containing sentences with unknown words, resulting
in about 60k pairs. Then, we translate sentences in both directions by doing word-byword translation
. In Table 5 , we report the BLEU score with this method, when using a dictionary
generated using nearest neighbors, and CSLS. With CSLS, this naive approach obtains 11.1 and 14.3 BLEU on English-Esperanto
and Esperanto-English respectively. Table 6 in the appendix shows some examples of sentences in Esperanto translated
into English using word-by-word translation.As one can see, the meaning is mostly conveyed in the translated sentences, but the translations contain some simple errors. For instance, the "mi" is translated into "sorry" instead of "i", etc. The translations
could easily be improved using a language model.
In this work, we show for the first time that one can align word embedding spaces without any cross-lingual supervision, i.e., solely based on unaligned datasets of each language, while reaching or outperforming the quality of previous supervised approaches in several cases.
Using adversarial training, we are able to initialize a linear mapping between a source and a target space, which we also use to produce a synthetic parallel dictionary.
It is then possible to apply the same techniques proposed for supervised techniques, namely a Procrustean optimization.
Two key ingredients contribute to the success of our approach: First we propose a simple criterion that is used as an effective unsupervised validation metric.
Second we propose the similarity measure CSLS, which mitigates the hubness problem and drastically increases the word translation accuracy.
As a result, our approach produces high-quality dictionaries between different pairs of languages, with up to 83.3% on the Spanish-English word translation task.
This performance is on par with supervised approaches.
Our method is also effective on the English-Esperanto pair, thereby showing that it works for lowresource language pairs, and can be used as a first step towards unsupervised machine translation.

assistant: text: Aligning languages without the Rosetta Stone: with no parallel data, we construct bilingual dictionaries using adversarial training, cross-domain local scaling, and an accurate proxy criterion for cross-validation.