SMaLL-100: Introducing Shallow Multilingual Machine Translation Model for Low-Resource Languages

Alireza Mohammadshahi, Vassilina Nikoulina, Alexandre Berard, Caroline Brun, James Henderson, Laurent Besacier


Abstract
In recent years, multilingual machine translation models have achieved promising performance on low-resource language pairs by sharing information between similar languages, thus enabling zero-shot translation. To overcome the “curse of multilinguality”, these models often opt for scaling up the number of parameters, which makes their use in resource-constrained environments challenging. We introduce SMaLL-100, a distilled version of the M2M-100(12B) model, a massively multilingual machine translation model covering 100 languages. We train SMaLL-100 with uniform sampling across all language pairs and therefore focus on preserving the performance of low-resource languages. We evaluate SMaLL-100 on different low-resource benchmarks: FLORES-101, Tatoeba, and TICO-19 and demonstrate that it outperforms previous massively multilingual models of comparable sizes (200-600M) while improving inference latency and memory usage. Additionally, our model achieves comparable results to M2M-100 (1.2B), while being 3.6x smaller and 4.3x faster at inference.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.571
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8348–8359
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.571
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.571
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alireza Mohammadshahi, Vassilina Nikoulina, Alexandre Berard, Caroline Brun, James Henderson, and Laurent Besacier. 2022. SMaLL-100: Introducing Shallow Multilingual Machine Translation Model for Low-Resource Languages. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8348–8359, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SMaLL-100: Introducing Shallow Multilingual Machine Translation Model for Low-Resource Languages (Mohammadshahi et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.571.pdf