Papers › DOCmT5: Document-Level Pretraining of Multilingual Language Models

DOCmT5: Document-Level Pretraining of Multilingual Language Models

16 Dec 2021Findings (NAACL) 2022 7arXiv:2112.08709archive 2025-07-28

Chia-Hsuan Lee, Aditya Siddhant, Viresh Ratnakar, Melvin Johnson

In this paper, we introduce DOCmT5, a multilingual sequence-to-sequence language model pretrained with large scale parallel documents. While previous approaches have focused on leveraging sentence-level parallel data, we try to build a general-purpose pretrained model that can understand and generate long documents. We propose a simple and effective pretraining objective - Document reordering Machine Translation (DrMT), in which the input documents that are shuffled and masked need to be translated. DrMT brings consistent improvements over strong baselines on a variety of document-level generation tasks, including over 12 BLEU points for seen-language-pair document-level MT, over 7 BLEU points for unseen-language-pair document-level MT and over 3 ROUGE-1 points for seen-language-pair cross-lingual summarization. We achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) on WMT20 De-En and IWSLT15 Zh-En document translation tasks. We also conduct extensive analysis on various factors for document pretraining, including (1) The effects of pretraining data quality and (2) The effects of combining mono-lingual and cross-lingual pretraining. We plan to make our model checkpoints publicly available.

PaperPDFConference PDF

In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.

Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Document SummarizationDocument TranslationLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingMachine TranslationSentenceTranslationde-en

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Document Summarization WikiLingua (tr->en) DOCmT5 Rouge-L 31.37 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections