Enhancing Low-Resource NMT with a Multilingual Encoder and Knowledge Distillation: A Case Study

Aniruddha Roy; Pretam Ray; Ayush Maheshwari; Sudeshna Sarkar; Pawan Goyal

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arXiv · 2407.06538

Enhancing Low-Resource NMT with a Multilingual Encoder and Knowledge Distillation: A Case Study

Aniruddha Roy·Pretam Ray·Ayush Maheshwari·Sudeshna Sarkar·Pawan Goyal

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Abstract

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) remains a formidable challenge, especially when dealing with low-resource languages. Pre-trained sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) multi-lingual models, such as mBART-50, have demonstrated impressive performance in various low-resource NMT tasks. However, their pre-training has been confined to 50 languages, leaving out support for numerous low-resource languages, particularly those spoken in the Indian subcontinent. Expanding mBART-50's language support requires complex pre-training, risking performance decline due to catastrophic forgetting. Considering these expanding challenges, this paper explores a framework that leverages the benefits of a pre-trained language model along with knowledge distillation in a seq2seq architecture to facilitate translation for low-resource languages, including those not covered by mBART-50. The proposed framework employs a multilingual encoder-based seq2seq model as the foundational architecture and subsequently uses complementary knowledge distillation techniques to mitigate the impact of imbalanced training. Our framework is evaluated on three low-resource Indic languages in four Indic-to-Indic directions, yielding significant BLEU-4 and chrF improvements over baselines. Further, we conduct human evaluation to confirm effectiveness of our approach. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/raypretam/Two-step-low-res-NMT.

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Aniruddha Roy, Pretam Ray, Ayush Maheshwari, Sudeshna Sarkar, Pawan Goyal. 2024-07-09. Enhancing Low-Resource NMT with a Multilingual Encoder and Knowledge Distillation: A Case Study. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06538

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