Improving Vietnamese-English Medical Machine Translation

Nhu Vo, Dat Quoc Nguyen, Dung D. Le, Massimo Piccardi, Wray Buntine

Abstract: Machine translation for Vietnamese-English in the medical domain is still an under-explored research area. In this paper, we introduce MedEV—a high-quality Vietnamese-English parallel dataset constructed specifically for the medical domain, comprising approximately 360K sentence pairs. We conduct extensive experiments comparing Google Translate, ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo), state-of-the-art Vietnamese-English neural machine translation models and pre-trained bilingual/multilingual sequence-to-sequence models on our new MedEV dataset. Experimental results show that the best performance is achieved by fine-tuning vinai-translate (Nguyen et al., 2022b) for each translation direction. We publicly release our dataset to promote further research.