2021/07/20 by Zeeshan Khan, Kartheek Akella, Khan, Zeeshan +5
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Software Engineering Research #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2107.09622
openalex publication_date 2021/07/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This work studies the long-standing problems of model capacity and negative interference in multilingual neural machine translation MNMT. We use network pruning techniques and observe that pruning 50-70% of the parameters from a trained MNMT model results only in a 0.29-1.98 drop in the BLEU score. Suggesting that there exist large redundancies even in MNMT models. These observations motivate us to use the redundant parameters and counter the interference problem efficiently. We propose a novel adaptation strategy, where we iteratively prune and retrain the redundant parameters of an MNMT to improve bilingual representations while retaining the multilinguality. Negative interference severely affects high resource languages, and our method alleviates it without any additional adapter modules. Hence, we call it parameter-free adaptation strategy, paving way for the efficient adaptation of MNMT. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a 9 language MNMT trained on TED talks, and report an average improvement of +1.36 BLEU on high resource pairs. Code will be released here.