Learning unsupervised word translations without adversaries

Abstract

Word translation, or bilingual dictionary induction, is an important capability that impacts many multilingual language processing tasks. Recent research has shown that word translation can be achieved in an unsupervised manner, without parallel seed dictionaries or aligned corpora. However, state of the art methods for unsupervised bilingual dictionary induction are based on generative adversarial models, and as such suffer from their well known problems of instability and hyper-parameter sensitivity. We present a statistical dependency-based approach to bilingual dictionary induction that is unsupervised - no seed dictionary or parallel corpora required; and introduces no adversary - therefore being much easier to train. Our method performs comparably to adversarial alternatives and outperforms prior non-adversarial methods.