# Loss in Translation: Learning Bilingual Word Mapping with a Retrieval Criterion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07745 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07745/

## Key facts

- Cited by 70 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [ChatGPT Beyond English: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models in Multilingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05613/) (2023)
- [WECHSEL: Effective initialization of subword embeddings for cross-lingual transfer of monolingual language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06598/) (2021)
- [Cross Modal Retrieval with Querybank Normalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12777/) (2021)
- [Are Multilingual Models Effective in Code-Switching?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13309/) (2021)
- [Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12540/) (2025)
- [How to Adapt Your Pretrained Multilingual Model to 1600 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02124/) (2021)
- [Black Box Few-Shot Adaptation for Vision-Language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01752/) (2023)
- [Bilingual Lexicon Induction via Unsupervised Bitext Construction and Word Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00148/) (2021)
- [Improving Word Translation via Two-Stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08307/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Relationship between Alignment and Cross-lingual Transfer in Multilingual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02790/) (2023)
- [Cultural Compass: Predicting Transfer Learning Success in Offensive Language Detection with Cultural Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06458/) (2023)
- [Crossing the Conversational Chasm: A Primer on Natural Language Processing for Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08570/) (2021)
- [Combining Static Word Embeddings and Contextual Representations for Bilingual Lexicon Induction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03084/) (2021)
- [Subword Mapping and Anchoring across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04556/) (2021)
- [Scalable Optimal Transport in High Dimensions for Graph Distances, Embedding Alignment, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06876/) (2021)
- [Shapley Head Pruning: Identifying and Removing Interference in Multilingual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05709/) (2022)
- [Combining Static and Contextualised Multilingual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09326/) (2022)
- [IsoVec: Controlling the Relative Isomorphism of Word Embedding Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05098/) (2022)
- [Improving Bilingual Lexicon Induction with Cross-Encoder Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16953/) (2022)
- [Cross-Lingual Word Embedding Refinement by ℓ1 Norm Optimisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04916/) (2021)
- [Bilingual Lexicon Induction for Low-Resource Languages using Graph Matching via Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14378/) (2022)
- [Quantized Wasserstein Procrustes Alignment of Word Embedding Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02468/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Dependency Parsing through Contextual Embedding Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02212/) (2021)
- [Cross-language Sentence Selection via Data Augmentation and Rationale Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02293/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Metadata Assignment for Cultural Heritage Artifacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00423/) (2024)
- [Cross-lingual hate speech detection based on multilingual domain-specific word embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14728/) (2021)
- [Multilingual Transformer Encoders: a Word-Level Task-Agnostic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09076/) (2022)
- [Combating the Curse of Multilinguality in Cross-Lingual WSD by Aligning Sparse Contextualized Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13776/) (2023)
- [Sinhala-English Parallel Word Dictionary Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02234/) (2023)
- [Deep Emotions Across Languages: A Novel Approach for Sentiment Propagation in Multilingual WordNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04715/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Continuous word representations learned separately on distinct languages can be aligned so that their words become comparable in a common space. Existing works typically solve a least-square regression problem to learn a rotation aligning a small bilingual lexicon, and use a retrieval criterion for inference. In this paper, we propose an unified formulation that directly optimizes a retrieval criterion in an end-to-end fashion. Our experiments on standard benchmarks show that our approach outperforms the state of the art on word translation, with the biggest improvements observed for distant language pairs such as English-Chinese.