# Improving Vietnamese-English Medical Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19161 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19161/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [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)
- [VnCoreNLP: A Vietnamese Natural Language Processing Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01331/) (2018)
- [A Fast and Accurate Vietnamese Word Segmenter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06307/) (2017)
- [PhoMT: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Benchmark Dataset for Vietnamese-English Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12199/) (2021)
- [MTet: Multi-domain Translation for English and Vietnamese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05610/) (2022)
- [A High-Quality and Large-Scale Dataset for English-Vietnamese Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04243/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [VN-MTEB: Vietnamese Massive Text Embedding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21500/) (2025)
- [ViMedCSS: A Vietnamese Medical Code-Switching Speech Dataset & Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12911/) (2026)
- [VietMix: A Naturally-Occurring Parallel Corpus and Augmentation Framework for Vietnamese-English Code-Mixed Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24472/) (2025)
- [Multilingual LLM Prompting Strategies for Medical English-Vietnamese Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15640/) (2025)
- [PiDA: Phonetically-Informed Data Augmentation for Robust Vietnamese Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12911/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine translation for Vietnamese-English in the medical domain is still an under-explored research area. In this paper, we introduce MedEV -- a high-quality Vietnamese-English parallel dataset constructed specifically for the medical domain, comprising approximately 360K sentence pairs. We conduct extensive experiments comparing Google Translate, ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo), state-of-the-art Vietnamese-English neural machine translation models and pre-trained bilingual/multilingual sequence-to-sequence models on our new MedEV dataset. Experimental results show that the best performance is achieved by fine-tuning "vinai-translate" for each translation direction. We publicly release our dataset to promote further research.