# Zero-Shot Language Transfer vs Iterative Back Translation for Unsupervised Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00106 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00106/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06709/) (2015)
- [Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04558/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Machine Translation Using Monolingual Corpora Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00043/) (2017)
- [Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02201/) (2016)
- [On Using Monolingual Corpora in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03535/) (2015)
- [The Tatoeba Translation Challenge -- Realistic Data Sets for Low Resource and Multilingual MT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06354/) (2020)
- [The IIT Bombay English-Hindi Parallel Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02855/) (2017)
- [The FLoRes Evaluation Datasets for Low-Resource Machine Translation: Nepali-English and Sinhala-English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01382/) (2019)
- [The Missing Ingredient in Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07091/) (2019)
- [Transfer Learning across Low-Resource, Related Languages for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09803/) (2017)
- [Trivial Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00357/) (2018)
- [Zero-Resource Translation with Multi-Lingual Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04164/) (2016)
- [When Does Unsupervised Machine Translation Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05516/) (2020)
- [A Call for More Rigor in Unsupervised Cross-lingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14958/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04596/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation with Domain-Aware Feature Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10430/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work focuses on comparing different solutions for machine translation on low resource language pairs, namely, with zero-shot transfer learning and unsupervised machine translation. We discuss how the data size affects the performance of both unsupervised MT and transfer learning. Additionally we also look at how the domain of the data affects the result of unsupervised MT. The code to all the experiments performed in this project are accessible on Github.