DENTRA: Denoising and Translation Pre-training for Multilingual Machine Translation

Samta Kamboj, Sunil Kumar Sahu, Neha Sengupta


Abstract
In this paper, we describe our submission to the WMT-2022: Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages under the Constrained Translation track. We introduce DENTRA, a novel pre-training strategy for a multilingual sequence-to-sequence transformer model. DENTRA pre-training combines denoising and translation objectives to incorporate both monolingual and bitext corpora in 24 African, English, and French languages. To evaluate the quality of DENTRA, we fine-tuned it with two multilingual machine translation configurations, one-to-many and many-to-one. In both pre-training and fine-tuning, we employ only the datasets provided by the organizers. We compare DENTRA against a strong baseline, M2M-100, in different African multilingual machine translation scenarios and show gains in 3 out of 4 subtasks.
Anthology ID:
2022.wmt-1.103
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Philipp Koehn, Loïc Barrault, Ondřej Bojar, Fethi Bougares, Rajen Chatterjee, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Alexander Fraser, Markus Freitag, Yvette Graham, Roman Grundkiewicz, Paco Guzman, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Tom Kocmi, André Martins, Makoto Morishita, Christof Monz, Masaaki Nagata, Toshiaki Nakazawa, Matteo Negri, Aurélie Névéol, Mariana Neves, Martin Popel, Marco Turchi, Marcos Zampieri
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1057–1067
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wmt-1.103
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Samta Kamboj, Sunil Kumar Sahu, and Neha Sengupta. 2022. DENTRA: Denoising and Translation Pre-training for Multilingual Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT), pages 1057–1067, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DENTRA: Denoising and Translation Pre-training for Multilingual Machine Translation (Kamboj et al., WMT 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wmt-1.103.pdf