From bilingual to multilingual neural machine translation by incremental training

Abstract

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation approaches are based on the use of task-specific models and the addition of one more language can only be done by retraining the whole system. In this work, we propose a new training schedule that allows the system to scale to more languages without modification of the previous components based on joint training and language-independent encoder/ decoder modules allowing for zero-shot translation. This work in progress shows close results to the state-of-the-art in the WMT task.