# PhoMT: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Benchmark Dataset for Vietnamese-English Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12199 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12199/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10464/) (2018)
- [WikiMatrix: Mining 135M Parallel Sentences in 1620 Language Pairs from Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05791/) (2019)
- [Scaling Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00187/) (2018)
- [WikiLingua: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03093/) (2020)
- [CCAligned: A Massive Collection of Cross-Lingual Web-Document Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06154/) (2019)
- [VnCoreNLP: A Vietnamese Natural Language Processing Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01331/) (2018)
- [A Call for Prudent Choice of Subword Merge Operations in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10453/) (2019)
- [A Fast and Accurate Vietnamese Word Segmenter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06307/) (2017)
- [Machine Translation between Vietnamese and English: an Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12557/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Dolphin: A Challenging and Diverse Benchmark for Arabic NLG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14989/) (2023)
- [Where Are We? Evaluating LLM Performance on African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19582/) (2025)
- [Crossing Linguistic Horizons: Finetuning and Comprehensive Evaluation of Vietnamese Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02715/) (2024)
- [MTet: Multi-domain Translation for English and Vietnamese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05610/) (2022)
- [Improving Vietnamese-English Medical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19161/) (2024)
- [Enriching Biomedical Knowledge for Low-resource Language Through Large-Scale Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05598/) (2022)
- [A High-Quality and Large-Scale Dataset for English-Vietnamese Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04243/) (2022)
- [VietMix: A Naturally-Occurring Parallel Corpus and Augmentation Framework for Vietnamese-English Code-Mixed Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24472/) (2025)
- [Survey of NLU Benchmarks Diagnosing Linguistic Phenomena: Why not Standardize Diagnostics Benchmarks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20419/) (2025)
- [Data-Driven Approach for Formality-Sensitive Machine Translation: Language-Specific Handling and Synthetic Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14514/) (2023)
- [PiDA: Phonetically-Informed Data Augmentation for Robust Vietnamese Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12911/) (2026)
- [Towards Efficient Simultaneous Inverse Text Normalization with Pretrained Text-to-Text Language Model and Read-Tag-Write Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19492/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a high-quality and large-scale Vietnamese-English parallel dataset of 3.02M sentence pairs, which is 2.9M pairs larger than the benchmark Vietnamese-English machine translation corpus IWSLT15. We conduct experiments comparing strong neural baselines and well-known automatic translation engines on our dataset and find that in both automatic and human evaluations: the best performance is obtained by fine-tuning the pre-trained sequence-to-sequence denoising auto-encoder mBART. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale Vietnamese-English machine translation study. We hope our publicly available dataset and study can serve as a starting point for future research and applications on Vietnamese-English machine translation.