Three Strategies to Improve One-to-Many Multilingual Translation

Due to the benefits of model compactness, multilingual translation (including many-to-one, many-to-many and one-to-many) based on a universal encoder-decoder architecture attracts more and more attention. However, previous studies show that one-to-many translation based on this framework cannot perform on par with the individually trained models. In this work, we introduce three strategies to improve one-to-many multilingual translation by balancing the shared and unique features. Within the architecture of one decoder for all target languages, we first exploit the use of unique initial states for different target languages. Then, we employ language-dependent positional embeddings. Finally and especially, we propose to divide the hidden cells of the decoder into shared and language-dependent ones. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods can obtain remarkable improvements over the strong baselines. Moreover, our strategies can achieve comparable or even better performance than the individually trained translation models.