No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation
Driven by the goal of eradicating language barriers on a global scale, machine translation has solidified itself as a key focus of artificial intelligence research today. However, such efforts have coalesced around a small subset of languages, leaving behind the vast majority of mostly low-resource languages. What does it take to break the 200 language barrier while ensuring safe, high quality results, all while keeping ethical considerations in mind? In No Language Left Behind, we took on this challenge by first contextualizing the need for low-resource language translation support through exploratory interviews with native speakers. Then, we created datasets and models aimed at narrowing the performance gap between low and high-resource languages. More specifically, we developed a conditional compute model based on Sparsely Gated Mixture of Experts that is trained on data obtained with novel and effective data mining techniques tailored for low-resource languages. We propose multiple architectural and training improvements to counteract overfitting while training on thousands of tasks. Critically, we evaluated the performance of over 40,000 different translation directions using a human-translated benchmark, Flores-200, and combined human evaluation with a novel toxicity benchmark covering all languages in Flores-200 to assess translation safety. Our model achieves an improvement of 44% BLEU relative to the previous state-of-the-art, laying important groundwork towards realizing a universal translation system. Finally, we open source all contributions described in this work, accessible at https://github.com/facebookresearch/fairseq/tree/nllb.
PDF Abstract Meta AI 2022 PDFCode
Colab
Datasets
Introduced in the Paper:
FLoRes-200
Used in the Paper:
WebText
OpenSubtitles
FLoRes-101
ParaCrawl
FLoRes
CCNet
CCMatrix
BUG
Results from the Paper
Ranked #1 on
Machine Translation
on IWSLT2017 French-English
(SacreBLEU metric)
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric Name | Metric Value | Global Rank | Benchmark |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Machine Translation | IWSLT2015 English-Vietnamese | NLLB-200 | SacreBLEU | 34.8 | # 1 | |
| Machine Translation | IWSLT2017 Arabic-English | NLLB-200 | SacreBLEU | 44.7 | # 1 | |
| Machine Translation | IWSLT2017 English-Arabic | NLLB-200 | SacreBLEU | 25.2 | # 1 | |
| Machine Translation | IWSLT2017 English-French | NLLB-200 | SacreBLEU | 43 | # 1 | |
| Machine Translation | IWSLT2017 French-English | NLLB-200 | SacreBLEU | 45.8 | # 1 |
