Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation

TL;DR

This paper develops a true Many-to-Many multilingual translation model for 100 languages, significantly improving direct non-English translation quality and providing open-source datasets and models for broader research.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive training dataset and a scalable model architecture for direct translation between any pair of 100 languages, moving beyond English-centric approaches.

Findings

Over 10 BLEU gain in non-English translation directions

Competitive performance with top WMT systems

Open-source datasets and models for community use

Abstract

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.