Back-translation for Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation
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Abstract (arXiv)
This paper illustrates our approach to the shared task on large-scale multilingual machine translation in the sixth conference on machine translation (WMT-21). This work aims to build a single multilingual translation system with a hypothesis that a universal cross-language representation leads to better multilingual translation performance. We extend the exploration of different back-translation methods from bilingual translation to multilingual translation. Better performance is obtained by the constrained sampling method, which is different from the finding of the bilingual translation. Besides, we also explore the effect of vocabularies and the amount of synthetic data. Surprisingly, the smaller size of vocabularies perform better, and the extensive monolingual English data offers a modest improvement. We submitted to both the small tasks and achieved the second place.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 17 of its 20 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2021.
Builds on
17 of 20 references.
References · 17
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5 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2022: 3; 2023: 3; 2024: 4; 2025: 1.
11 papers.
- 2024Best Practices and Lessons Learned on Synthetic Datacited by 104
- 2025Enhancing LLM Safety Through a Theoretical Minimax Game Lenscited by 18
- 2023Viewing Knowledge Transfer in Multilingual Machine Translation Through a Representational Lenscited by 15
- 2023Mitigating Data Imbalance and Representation Degeneration in Multilingual Machine Translationcited by 5
- 2024Backdoor Attack on Multilingual Machine Translationcited by 5
- 2022Learning an Artificial Language for Knowledge-Sharing in Multilingual Translationcited by 4
- 2023Ask Language Model to Clean Your Noisy Translation Datacited by 3
- 2024IKUN for WMT24 General MT Task: LLMs Are here for Multilingual Machine Translationcited by 3
- 2024Low-Resource Machine Translation through the Lens of Personalized Federated Learningcited by 1
- 2022The VolcTrans System for WMT22 Multilingual Machine Translation Taskcited by 0
- 2022University of Cape Town's WMT22 System: Multilingual Machine Translation for Southern African Languagescited by 0
- 2025Enhancing LLM Safety Through a Theoretical Minimax Game Lens7 Feb 2025
- 2024IKUN for WMT24 General MT Task: LLMs Are here for Multilingual Machine Translation21 Aug 2024
- 2024Low-Resource Machine Translation through the Lens of Personalized Federated Learning18 Jun 2024
- 2024Best Practices and Lessons Learned on Synthetic Data11 Apr 2024
- 2024Backdoor Attack on Multilingual Machine Translation3 Apr 2024
- 2023Ask Language Model to Clean Your Noisy Translation Data20 Oct 2023
- 2023Mitigating Data Imbalance and Representation Degeneration in Multilingual Machine Translation22 May 2023
- 2023Viewing Knowledge Transfer in Multilingual Machine Translation Through a Representational Lens19 May 2023
- 2022Learning an Artificial Language for Knowledge-Sharing in Multilingual Translation2 Nov 2022
- 2022University of Cape Town's WMT22 System: Multilingual Machine Translation for Southern African Languages21 Oct 2022
- 2022The VolcTrans System for WMT22 Multilingual Machine Translation Task20 Oct 2022