English

Towards Inducing Long-Context Abilities in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Models

Computation and Language 2025-02-11 v3

Abstract

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have traditionally used Sinusoidal Positional Embeddings (PEs), which often struggle to capture long-range dependencies and are inefficient for handling extended context or document-level translation tasks. This work addresses the challenge of transitioning pre-trained NMT models from absolute Sinusoidal PEs to Relative PEs, such as RoPE and ALiBi, without compromising performance. We demonstrate that parameter-efficient fine-tuning, using only a small amount of high-quality data, can successfully facilitate this transition. Experimental results indicate that switching from Sinusoidal to Relative PEs results in competitive translation quality on sentence-level evaluation benchmarks. Additionally, models trained with RoPE consistently outperform those using ALiBi and Sinusoidal PEs on document-level benchmarks across both string-based metrics and qualitative evaluations. Moreover, we find that a small amount of long-context data in a few languages is sufficient for cross-lingual length generalization, thereby inducing long-context capabilities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.11382,
  title  = {Towards Inducing Long-Context Abilities in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Models},
  author = {Varun Gumma and Pranjal A. Chitale and Kalika Bali},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.11382},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted at NAACL 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:19:05.889Z