# Data Processing Matters: SRPH-Konvergen AI's Machine Translation System for WMT'21

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.10513 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10513/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [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)
- [Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06709/) (2015)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03193/) (2021)
- [OpenNMT: Open-source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03815/) (2017)
- [WikiMatrix: Mining 135M Parallel Sentences in 1620 Language Pairs from Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05791/) (2019)
- [CCAligned: A Massive Collection of Cross-Lingual Web-Document Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06154/) (2019)
- [DeltaLM: Encoder-Decoder Pre-training for Language Generation and Translation by Augmenting Pretrained Multilingual Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13736/) (2021)
- [Simplifying Paragraph-level Question Generation via Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01107/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Low-Resource Machine Translation through the Lens of Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12564/) (2024)
- [Samsung R&D Institute Philippines at WMT 2023](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16322/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we describe the submission of the joint Samsung Research Philippines-Konvergen AI team for the WMT'21 Large Scale Multilingual Translation Task - Small Track 2. We submit a standard Seq2Seq Transformer model to the shared task without any training or architecture tricks, relying mainly on the strength of our data preprocessing techniques to boost performance. Our final submission model scored 22.92 average BLEU on the FLORES-101 devtest set, and scored 22.97 average BLEU on the contest's hidden test set, ranking us sixth overall. Despite using only a standard Transformer, our model ranked first in Indonesian to Javanese, showing that data preprocessing matters equally, if not more, than cutting edge model architectures and training techniques.