A Single Model Ensemble Framework for Neural Machine Translation Using Pivot Translation

Seokjin Oh, Keonwoong Noh, Woohwan Jung


Abstract
Despite the recent remarkable advances in neural machine translation, translation quality for low-resource language pairs remains subpar. Ensembling multiple systems is a widely adopted technique to enhance performance, often accomplished by combining probability distributions. However, previous approaches face the challenge of high computational costs for training multiple models. Furthermore, for black-box models, averaging token-level probabilities at each decoding step is not feasible. To address the problems of multi-model ensemble methods, we present a pivot-based single model ensemble. The proposed strategy consists of two steps: pivot-based candidate generation and post-hoc aggregation. In the first step, we generate candidates through pivot translation. This can be achieved with only a single model and facilitates knowledge transfer from high-resource pivot languages, resulting in candidates that are not only diverse but also more accurate. Next, in the aggregation step, we select k high-quality candidates from the generated candidates and merge them to generate a final translation that outperforms the existing candidates. Our experimental results show that our method produces translations of superior quality by leveraging candidates from pivot translation to capture the subtle nuances of the source sentence.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.672
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
8520–8534
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-672
DOI:
10.63317/5jpaoar9p6cf
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seokjin Oh, Keonwoong Noh, and Woohwan Jung. 2026. A Single Model Ensemble Framework for Neural Machine Translation Using Pivot Translation. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 8520–8534, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
A Single Model Ensemble Framework for Neural Machine Translation Using Pivot Translation (Oh et al., LREC 2026)
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