# Setting up the Data Printer with Improved English to Ukrainian Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15196 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15196/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05638/) (2022)
- [Transformers learn in-context by gradient descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07677/) (2022)
- [The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03193/) (2021)
- [Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07827/) (2024)
- [The Tatoeba Translation Challenge -- Realistic Data Sets for Low Resource and Multilingual MT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06354/) (2020)
- [Correcting Length Bias in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10006/) (2018)
- [The Devil is in the Detail: Simple Tricks Improve Systematic Generalization of Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12284/) (2021)
- [How to Train Data-Efficient LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09668/) (2024)
- [WECHSEL: Effective initialization of subword embeddings for cross-lingual transfer of monolingual language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06598/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Generative Language Models Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05448/) (2021)
- [UA-GEC: Grammatical Error Correction and Fluency Corpus for the Ukrainian Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16997/) (2021)
- [BootAug: Boosting Text Augmentation via Hybrid Instance Filtering Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02941/) (2022)

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

- [Benchmarking Multimodal Models for Ukrainian Language Understanding Across Academic and Cultural Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14647/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Data Validation Methods for Efficient Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07880/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To build large language models for Ukrainian we need to expand our corpora with large amounts of new algorithmic tasks expressed in natural language. Examples of task performance expressed in English are abundant, so with a high-quality translation system our community will be enabled to curate datasets faster. To aid this goal, we introduce a recipe to build a translation system using supervised finetuning of a large pretrained language model with a noisy parallel dataset of 3M pairs of Ukrainian and English sentences followed by a second phase of training using 17K examples selected by k-fold perplexity filtering on another dataset of higher quality. Our decoder-only model named Dragoman beats performance of previous state of the art encoder-decoder models on the FLORES devtest set.