# Joey NMT: A Minimalist NMT Toolkit for Novices

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.12484 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12484/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02022/) (2022)
- [Signing at Scale: Learning to Co-Articulate Signs for Large-Scale Photo-Realistic Sign Language Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15354/) (2022)
- [Gloss Attention for Gloss-free Sign Language Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07361/) (2023)
- [Continuous 3D Multi-Channel Sign Language Production via Progressive Transformers and Mixture Density Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06982/) (2021)
- [Mixed SIGNals: Sign Language Production via a Mixture of Motion Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11317/) (2021)
- [Stochastic Transformer Networks with Linear Competing Units: Application to end-to-end SL Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13318/) (2021)
- [Revisiting the Weaknesses of Reinforcement Learning for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08942/) (2021)
- [Many-to-English Machine Translation Tools, Data, and Pretrained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00290/) (2021)
- [Skeletor: Skeletal Transformers for Robust Body-Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11712/) (2021)
- [Learning Kernel-Smoothed Machine Translation with Retrieved Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09991/) (2021)
- [A Large-Scale Study of Machine Translation in the Turkic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04593/) (2021)
- [Machine Translation between Spoken Languages and Signed Languages Represented in SignWriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05404/) (2022)
- [A Data-Driven Representation for Sign Language Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11499/) (2024)
- [Bandits Don't Follow Rules: Balancing Multi-Facet Machine Translation with Multi-Armed Bandits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06997/) (2021)
- [Changing the Representation: Examining Language Representation for Neural Sign Language Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06312/) (2022)
- [Smoothing and Shrinking the Sparse Seq2Seq Search Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10291/) (2021)
- [Skeletal Graph Self-Attention: Embedding a Skeleton Inductive Bias into Sign Language Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05277/) (2021)
- [COMET-QE and Active Learning for Low-Resource Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15696/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Multiway Multilingual NMT in the Turkic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06262/) (2021)
- [Tram: A Token-level Retrieval-augmented Mechanism for Source Code Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11074/) (2023)
- [A New Dataset for End-to-End Sign Language Translation: The Greek Elementary School Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04753/) (2023)
- [English2Gbe: A multilingual machine translation model for {Fon/Ewe}Gbe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11482/) (2021)
- [Domain-specific MT for Low-resource Languages: The case of Bambara-French](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00041/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Supervised Learning with Contrastive Markings in Neural Machine Translation Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08416/) (2023)
- [Select and Reorder: A Novel Approach for Neural Sign Language Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11532/) (2024)
- [Towards a general purpose machine translation system for Sranantongo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06383/) (2022)
- [Script Normalization for Unconventional Writing of Under-Resourced Languages in Bilingual Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16407/) (2023)
- [On the Depth between Beam Search and Exhaustive Search for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13696/) (2023)
- [adaptNMT: an open-source, language-agnostic development environment for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02367/) (2024)
- [SignLLM: Sign Language Production Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10718/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Joey NMT, a minimalist neural machine translation toolkit based on PyTorch that is specifically designed for novices. Joey NMT provides many popular NMT features in a small and simple code base, so that novices can easily and quickly learn to use it and adapt it to their needs. Despite its focus on simplicity, Joey NMT supports classic architectures (RNNs, transformers), fast beam search, weight tying, and more, and achieves performance comparable to more complex toolkits on standard benchmarks. We evaluate the accessibility of our toolkit in a user study where novices with general knowledge about Pytorch and NMT and experts work through a self-contained Joey NMT tutorial, showing that novices perform almost as well as experts in a subsequent code quiz. Joey NMT is available at https://github.com/joeynmt/joeynmt .