Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond [article]

Mikel Artetxe, Holger Schwenk
2019 arXiv   pre-print
We introduce an architecture to learn joint multilingual sentence representations for 93 languages, belonging to more than 30 different families and written in 28 different scripts. Our system uses a single BiLSTM encoder with a shared BPE vocabulary for all languages, which is coupled with an auxiliary decoder and trained on publicly available parallel corpora. This enables us to learn a classifier on top of the resulting embeddings using English annotated data only, and transfer it to any of
more » ... he 93 languages without any modification. Our experiments in cross-lingual natural language inference (XNLI dataset), cross-lingual document classification (MLDoc dataset) and parallel corpus mining (BUCC dataset) show the effectiveness of our approach. We also introduce a new test set of aligned sentences in 112 languages, and show that our sentence embeddings obtain strong results in multilingual similarity search even for low-resource languages. Our implementation, the pre-trained encoder and the multilingual test set are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LASER
arXiv:1812.10464v2 fatcat:u7ga6lnk7jazbffwiox5fdc754