Papers › Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation

Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation

21 Oct 2020arXiv:2010.11125archive 2025-07-28

Angela Fan, Shruti Bhosale, Holger Schwenk, Zhiyi Ma, Ahmed El-Kishky, Siddharth Goyal, Mandeep Baines, Onur Celebi, Guillaume Wenzek, Vishrav Chaudhary, Naman Goyal, Tom Birch, Vitaliy Liptchinsky, Sergey Edunov, Edouard Grave, Michael Auli, Armand Joulin

Existing work in translation demonstrated the potential of massively multilingual machine translation by training a single model able to translate between any pair of languages. However, much of this work is English-Centric by training only on data which was translated from or to English. While this is supported by large sources of training data, it does not reflect translation needs worldwide. In this work, we create a true Many-to-Many multilingual translation model that can translate directly between any pair of 100 languages. We build and open source a training dataset that covers thousands of language directions with supervised data, created through large-scale mining. Then, we explore how to effectively increase model capacity through a combination of dense scaling and language-specific sparse parameters to create high quality models. Our focus on non-English-Centric models brings gains of more than 10 BLEU when directly translating between non-English directions while performing competitively to the best single systems of WMT. We open-source our scripts so that others may reproduce the data, evaluation, and final M2M-100 model.

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pytorch/fairseq officialmentioned in paperpytorch report
Hanlard/M2M-by-fastmoe mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
UKPLab/EasyNMT mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
huggingface/transformers mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
ikergarcia1996/Easy-Translate mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
xhluca/dl-translate mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
xhlulu/dl-translate mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
zurichnlp/contradecode mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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