  We introduce Generative Neural Machine Translation (GNMT), a latent variable
architecture which is designed to model the semantics of the source and target
sentences. We modify an encoder-decoder translation model by adding a latent
variable as a language agnostic representation which is encouraged to learn the
meaning of the sentence. GNMT achieves competitive BLEU scores on pure
translation tasks, and is superior when there are missing words in the source
sentence. We augment the model to facilitate multilingual translation and
semi-supervised learning without adding parameters. This framework
significantly reduces overfitting when there is limited paired data available,
and is effective for translating between pairs of languages not seen during
training.
