mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Pivot-based Transfer Learning for Neural Machine Translation between Non-English Languages

arXiv 1909.09524 ↗First posted 20 Sep 2019cs.CL cs.LGcited by 36

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Abstract (arXiv)

We present effective pre-training strategies for neural machine translation (NMT) using parallel corpora involving a pivot language, i.e., source-pivot and pivot-target, leading to a significant improvement in source-target translation. We propose three methods to increase the relation among source, pivot, and target languages in the pre-training: 1) step-wise training of a single model for different language pairs, 2) additional adapter component to smoothly connect pre-trained encoder and decoder, and 3) cross-lingual encoder training via autoencoding of the pivot language. Our methods greatly outperform multilingual models up to +2.6% BLEU in WMT 2019 French-German and German-Czech tasks. We show that our improvements are valid also in zero-shot/zero-resource scenarios.

Key facts. Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2019.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 14; 2022: 5; 2023: 6; 2024: 4; 2025: 4; 2026: 3.

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  1. 2021Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages: A Surveycited by 108
  2. 2021Sustainable Modular Debiasing of Language Modelscited by 98
  3. 2021Survey of Low-Resource Machine Translationcited by 92
  4. 2021Revisiting the Primacy of English in Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfercited by 47
  5. 2021Domain Adaptation and Multi-Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation: A Surveycited by 46
  6. 2021Multilingual Machine Translation Systems from Microsoft for WMT21 Shared Taskcited by 34
  7. 2021Language Models are Good Translatorscited by 16
  8. 2021A Survey on Low-Resource Neural Machine Translationcited by 16
  9. 2024InterTrans: Leveraging Transitive Intermediate Translations to Enhance LLM-based Code Translationcited by 15
  10. 2022Visual Comparison of Language Model Adaptationcited by 14
  11. 2022UM4: Unified Multilingual Multiple Teacher-Student Model for Zero-Resource Neural Machine Translationcited by 10
  12. 2025Revisiting Multilingual Data Mixtures in Language Model Pretrainingcited by 10
24 more
  1. 2022Practice Makes a Solver Perfect: Data Augmentation for Math Word Problem Solverscited by 9
  2. 2025From Unaligned to Aligned: Scaling Multilingual LLMs with Multi-Way Parallel Corporacited by 6
  3. 2023Investigating Multi-Pivot Ensembling with Massively Multilingual Machine Translation Modelscited by 5
  4. 2021AUGVIC: Exploiting BiText Vicinity for Low-Resource NMTcited by 4
  5. 2023SCALE: Synergized Collaboration of Asymmetric Language Translation Enginescited by 3
  6. 2024Dictionary Insertion Prompting for Multilingual Reasoning on Multilingual Large Language Modelscited by 3
  7. 2025Pi-SQL: Enhancing Text-to-SQL with Fine-Grained Guidance from Pivot Programming Languagescited by 3
  8. 2021EdinSaar@WMT21: North-Germanic Low-Resource Multilingual NMTcited by 2
  9. 2022Triangular Transfer: Freezing the Pivot for Triangular Machine Translationcited by 2
  10. 2023VAKTA-SETU: A Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation Service in Select Indic Languagescited by 2
  11. 2024POMP: Probability-driven Meta-graph Prompter for LLMs in Low-resource Unsupervised Neural Machine Translationcited by 2
  12. 2021Self-Learning for Zero Shot Neural Machine Translationcited by 1
  13. 2021Language Model Metrics and Procrustes Analysis for Improved Vector Transformation of NLP Embeddingscited by 1
  14. 2022MALM: Mixing Augmented Language Modeling for Zero-Shot Machine Translationcited by 1
  15. 2024A Data Selection Approach for Enhancing Low Resource Machine Translation Using Cross-Lingual Sentence Representationscited by 1
  16. 2021Integrated Training for Sequence-to-Sequence Models Using Non-Autoregressive Transformercited by 0
  17. 2021Towards Reinforcement Learning for Pivot-based Neural Machine Translation with Non-autoregressive Transformercited by 0
  18. 2023End-to-end Training and Decoding for Pivot-based Cascaded Translation Modelcited by 0
  19. 2023Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System for Indic to Indic Languagescited by 0
  20. 2023Direct Neural Machine Translation with Task-level Mixture of Experts modelscited by 0
  21. 2025A Single Model Ensemble Framework for Neural Machine Translation using Pivot Translationcited by 0
  22. 2026Cross-Lingual Transfer for Machine Translation in Turkic Languagescited by 0
  23. 2026Predicting Multilingual Classification and Translation Performance of LLMs with Cross-Lingual Alignment -- Is English Enough?cited by 0
  24. 2026Translation as a Decision Space: A Multi-Agent Perspective on Low-Resource Dialect Generationcited by 0