$m^4Adapter$: Multilingual Multi-Domain Adaptation for Machine Translation with a Meta-Adapter

Abstract

Multilingual neural machine translation models (MNMT) yield state-of-the-art performance when evaluated on data from a domain and language pair seen at training time. However, when a MNMT model is used to translate under domain shift or to a new language pair, performance drops dramatically. We consider a very challenging scenario: adapting the MNMT model both to a new domain and to a new language pair at the same time. In this paper, we propose $m^4Adapter$ (Multilingual Multi-Domain Adaptation for Machine Translation with a Meta-Adapter), which combines domain and language knowledge using meta-learning with adapters. We present results showing that our approach is a parameter-efficient solution which effectively adapts a model to both a new language pair and a new domain, while outperforming other adapter methods. An ablation study also shows that our approach more effectively transfers domain knowledge across different languages and language information across different domains.