English

Multilingual k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation

Computation and Language 2023-10-24 v1

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.14644,
  title  = {Multilingual k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation},
  author = {David Stap and Christof Monz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.14644},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted to EMNLP

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:58:32.474Z