There were many sentences in the abstract and in other places in the paper where the authors stuff too much information into a single sentence. This could be avoided. One can always use an extra sentence to be more clear.
There could have been a section where the actual method used could be explained in a more detailed. This explanation is glossed over in the paper. It's non-trivial to guess the idea from reading the sections alone.
During test time, you need the source-pivot corpus as well. This is a major disadvantage of this approach. This is played down - in fact it's not mentioned at all. I could strongly encourage the authors to mention this and comment on it. - General Discussion: This paper uses knowledge distillation to improve zero-resource translation.
The techniques used in this paper are very similar to the one proposed in Yoon Kim et. al. The innovative part is that they use it for doing zero-resource translation. They compare against other prominent works in the field. Their approach also eliminates the need to do double decoding.
Detailed comments: - Line 21-27 - the authors could have avoided this complicated structure for two simple sentences.
Line 41 - Johnson et. al has SOTA on English-French and German-English.
Line 77-79 there is no evidence provided as to why combination of multiple languages increases complexity. Please retract this statement or provide more evidence. Evidence in literature seems to suggest the opposite.
Line 416-420 - The two lines here are repeated again. They were first mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Line 577 - Figure 2 not 3!
- Line 21-27 - the authors could have avoided this complicated structure for two simple sentences. Line 41 - Johnson et. al has SOTA on English-French and German-English. Line 77-79 there is no evidence provided as to why combination of multiple languages increases complexity. Please retract this statement or provide more evidence. Evidence in literature seems to suggest the opposite. Line 416-420 - The two lines here are repeated again. They were first mentioned in the previous paragraph. Line 577 - Figure 2 not 3!