Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Table 5: For a low-resource Spanish-English task, we experiment with several choices of parent model: none, French-English, and German-English. We hypothesize that French-English is best because French and Spanish are similar.
['Parent', 'Bleu', 'PPL']
If we just train a model with no transfer on a small Spanish-English training set we get a Bleu score of 16.4. When using our transfer method using French and German as parent languages, we get Bleu scores of 31.0 and 29.8 respectively. As expected, French is a better parent than German for Spanish, which could be the result of the parent language being more similar to the child language.