Visual Prediction Improves Zero-Shot Cross-Modal Machine Translation

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Multimodal machine translation (MMT) systems have been successfully developed in recent years for a few language pairs. However, training such models usually requires tuples of a source language text, target language text, and images. Obtaining these data involves expensive human annotations, making it difficult to develop models for unseen text-only language pairs. In this work, we propose the task of zero-shot cross-modal machine translation aiming to transfer multimodal knowledge from an existing multimodal parallel corpus into a new translation direction. We also introduce a novel MMT model with a visual prediction network to learn visual features grounded on multimodal parallel data and provide pseudo-features for text-only language pairs. With this training paradigm, our MMT model outperforms its text-only counterpart. In our extensive analyses, we show that (i) the selection of visual features is important, and (ii) training on image-aware translations and being grounded on a similar language pair are mandatory. Our code are available at https://github.com/toshohirasawa/zeroshot-crossmodal-mt.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 8th Conference on Machine Translation, WMT 2023
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Publication date2023
Pages520-533
ISBN (Electronic)9798891760417
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event8th Conference on Machine Translation, WMT 2023 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: 6 Dec 20237 Dec 2023

Conference

Conference8th Conference on Machine Translation, WMT 2023
LandSingapore
BySingapore
Periode06/12/202307/12/2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics.

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