{"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/investigating-the-translation-performance-of","title":"Investigating the Translation Performance of a Large Multilingual Language Model: the Case of BLOOM","arxiv_id":"2303.01911","date":"2023-03-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Rachel Bawden","François Yvon"],"abstract":"The NLP community recently saw the release of a new large open-access multilingual language model, BLOOM (BigScience et al., 2022) covering 46 languages. We focus on BLOOM's multilingual ability by evaluating its machine translation performance across several datasets (WMT, Flores-101 and DiaBLa) and language pairs (high- and low-resourced). Our results show that 0-shot performance suffers from overgeneration and generating in the wrong language, but this is greatly improved in the few-shot setting, with very good results for a number of language pairs. We study several aspects including prompt design, model sizes, cross-lingual transfer and the use of discursive context.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01911v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.01911v2.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":"investigating-the-translation-performance-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/rbawden/mt-bigscience","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"cross-lingual-transfer","task_name":"Cross-Lingual Transfer"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"bloom","method_name":"BLOOM"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2303.01911","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}