Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languages
Abstract
In this paper we share findings from our effort towards building practical machine translation (MT) systems capable of translating across over one thousand languages. We describe results across three research domains:
(i) Building clean, web-mined datasets by leveraging semi-supervised pre-training for language-id and developing data-driven filtering techniques; (ii) Leveraging massively multilingual MT models trained with supervised parallel data for over $100$ languages and small monolingual datasets for over $1000$ languages to enable translation for several previously under-studied languages; and (iii) Studying the limitations of evaluation metrics for long tail languages and conducting qualitative analysis of the outputs from our MT models. We hope that our work provides useful insights to practitioners working towards building MT systems for long tail languages, and highlights research directions that can complement the weaknesses of massively multilingual pre-trained models in data-sparse settings.
Research Areas
