{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-shocking-amount-of-the-web-is-machine","title":"A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism","arxiv_id":"2401.05749","date":"2024-01-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Brian Thompson","Mehak Preet Dhaliwal","Peter Frisch","Tobias Domhan","Marcello Federico"],"abstract":"We show that content on the web is often translated into many languages, and the low quality of these multi-way translations indicates they were likely created using Machine Translation (MT). Multi-way parallel, machine generated content not only dominates the translations in lower resource languages; it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages. We also find evidence of a selection bias in the type of content which is translated into many languages, consistent with low quality English content being translated en masse into many lower resource languages, via MT. Our work raises serious concerns about training models such as multilingual large language models on both monolingual and bilingual data scraped from the web.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05749v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05749v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-shocking-amount-of-the-web-is-machine","repo_url":"https://github.com/amazon-science/multi-way-parallel-ccmatrix","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"selection-bias","task_name":"Selection bias"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2401.05749","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2401.05749","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2401.05749"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/amazon-science/multi-way-parallel-ccmatrix","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"summary":{"ran":2,"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":3,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"0d2ec3a4d8c85b6b","entry":"assign_bin","repo":"amazon-science/multi-way-parallel-ccmatrix","repo_kind":"official","path":"data_analysis/plot_marginscore_stats.py","file_url":"https://github.com/amazon-science/multi-way-parallel-ccmatrix/blob/HEAD/data_analysis/plot_marginscore_stats.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"0d2ec3a4d8c85b6b"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"f388998d7d3cef69","entry":"find_bin","repo":"amazon-science/multi-way-parallel-ccmatrix","repo_kind":"official","path":"data_analysis/utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/amazon-science/multi-way-parallel-ccmatrix/blob/HEAD/data_analysis/utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"f388998d7d3cef69"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"22281a6d4a781cc1","entry":"process_bucket","repo":"amazon-science/multi-way-parallel-ccmatrix","repo_kind":"official","path":"data_analysis/plot_marginscore_stats.py","file_url":"https://github.com/amazon-science/multi-way-parallel-ccmatrix/blob/HEAD/data_analysis/plot_marginscore_stats.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"22281a6d4a781cc1"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}