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The DOI matches its Crossref record; 43 of the 43 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Phrase-Based & Neural Unsupervised Machine Translation

Open access
Lample, Guillaume, Ott, Myle, Conneau, Alexis, Denoyer, Ludovic, Ranzato, Marc’Aurelio·2018·Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Machine translation systems achieve near human-level performance on some languages, yet their effectiveness strongly relies on the availability of large amounts of parallel sentences, which hinders their applicability to the majority of language pairs.This work investigates how to learn to translate when having access to only large monolingual corpora in each language.We propose two model variants, a neural and a phrase-based model.Both versions leverage a careful initialization of the parameters, the denoising effect of language models and automatic generation of parallel data by iterative back-translation.These models are significantly better than methods from the literature, while being simpler and having fewer hyper-parameters.On the widely used WMT'14 English-French and WMT'16 German-English benchmarks, our models respectively obtain 28.1 and 25.2 BLEU points without using a single parallel sentence, outperforming the state of the art by more than 11 BLEU points.On low-resource languages like English-Urdu and English-Romanian, our methods achieve even better results than semisupervised and supervised approaches leveraging the paucity of available bitexts.Our code for NMT and PBSMT is publicly available.

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Metadata

Authors
Lample, G., Ott, M., Conneau, A., Denoyer, L., & Ranzato, M.
Venue
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Published
2018
Pages
5039-5049
OpenAlex
W2963206679
Cited by
615
References
43
FWCI
46.71
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Phrase-Based & Neural Unsupervised Machine Translation. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.18653/v1/d18-1549
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Lample, G., Ott, M., Conneau, A., Denoyer, L., & Ranzato, M. (2018). Phrase-Based & Neural Unsupervised Machine Translation. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d18-1549

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