mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Multilingual k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation

arXiv 2310.14644 ↗First posted 23 Oct 2023cs.CLcited by 3

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Abstract (arXiv)

k-nearest-neighbor machine translation has demonstrated remarkable improvements in machine translation quality by creating a datastore of cached examples. However, these improvements have been limited to high-resource language pairs, with large datastores, and remain a challenge for low-resource languages. In this paper, we address this issue by combining representations from multiple languages into a single datastore. Our results consistently demonstrate substantial improvements not only in low-resource translation quality (up to +3.6 BLEU), but also for high-resource translation quality (up to +0.5 BLEU). Our experiments show that it is possible to create multilingual datastores that are a quarter of the size, achieving a 5.3x speed improvement, by using linguistic similarities for datastore creation.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 19 of its 24 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2023.

Builds on

19 of 24 references.

References · 19

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2018A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scorescited by 1,799
  3. 2019Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Modelscited by 800
  4. 2020Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translationcited by 561
  5. 2016Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translationcited by 469
  6. 2019Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Wild: Findings and Challengescited by 257
  7. 2020Nearest Neighbor Machine Translationcited by 209
  8. 2018When and Why are Pre-trained Word Embeddings Useful for Neural Machine Translation?cited by 126
  9. 2017Generating Sentences by Editing Prototypescited by 88
  10. 2021Neural Machine Translation with Monolingual Translation Memorycited by 61
  11. 2021Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Machine Translationcited by 58
  12. 2018Trivial Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translationcited by 47
7 more
  1. 2021Fast Nearest Neighbor Machine Translationcited by 37
  2. 2019Non-Parametric Adaptation for Neural Machine Translationcited by 34
  3. 2022Chunk-based Nearest Neighbor Machine Translationcited by 21
  4. 2022Towards Robust k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translationcited by 15
  5. 2023Viewing Knowledge Transfer in Multilingual Machine Translation Through a Representational Lenscited by 15
  6. 2019From Bilingual to Multilingual Neural Machine Translation by Incremental Trainingcited by 14
  7. 2023kNN-BOX: A Unified Framework for Nearest Neighbor Generationcited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.

3 papers.

  1. 2025On the Consistency of Multilingual Context Utilization in Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 10
  2. 2024Efficient k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation with Dynamic Retrievalcited by 2
  3. 2026Analyzing and Improving Cross-lingual Knowledge Transfer for Machine Translationcited by 0