Effective Guidance in Zero-Shot Multilingual Translation via Multiple Language Prototypes

In a multilingual neural machine translation model that fully shares parameters across all languages, a popular approach is to use an artificial language token to guide translation into the desired target language. However, recent studies have shown that language-specific signals in prepended language tokens are not adequate to guide the MNMT models to translate into right directions, especially on zero-shot translation (i.e., off-target translation issue). We argue that the representations of prepended language tokens are overly affected by its context information, resulting in potential information loss of language tokens and insufficient indicative ability. To address this issue, we introduce multiple language prototypes to guide translation into the desired target language. Specifically, we categorize sparse contextualized language representations into a few representative prototypes over training set, and inject their representations into each individual token to guide the models. Experiments on several multilingual datasets show that our method significantly alleviates the off-target translation issue and improves the translation quality on both zero-shot and supervised directions.