GATITOS: Using a New Multilingual Lexicon for Low-resource Machine Translation
Submission Type: Regular Long Paper
Submission Track: Machine Translation
Submission Track 2: Multilinguality and Linguistic Diversity
Keywords: machine translation, low-resource, lexicons, dictionaries, unsupervised, NMT, MT, data augmentation
TL;DR: Data augmentation using multilingual lexicons improves the performance of massively multilingual NMT models on low-resource languages
Abstract: Modern machine translation models and language models are able to translate without having been trained on parallel data, greatly expanding the set of languages that they can serve. However, these models still struggle in a variety of predictable ways, a problem that cannot be overcome without at least some trusted bilingual data. This work expands on a cheap and abundant resource to combat this problem: bilingual lexica. We test the efficacy of bilingual lexica in a real-world set-up, on 200-language translation models trained on web-crawled text. We present several findings: (1) using lexical data augmentation, we demonstrate sizable performance gains for unsupervised translation; (2) we compare several families of data augmentation, demonstrating that they yield similar improvements, and can be combined for even greater improvements; (3) we demonstrate the importance of carefully curated lexica over larger, noisier ones, especially with larger models; and (4) we compare the efficacy of multilingual lexicon data versus human-translated parallel data. Based on results from (3), we develop and open-source GATITOS, a high-quality, curated dataset in 168 tail languages, one of the first human-translated resources to cover many of these languages.
Submission Number: 1054
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