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

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gumma, Varun, Chitale, Pranjal A., Bali, Kalika
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Gumma, Varun
Chitale, Pranjal A.
Bali, Kalika
author_facet Gumma, Varun
Chitale, Pranjal A.
Bali, Kalika
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_11382
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Inducing Long-Context Abilities in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Models
Gumma, Varun
Chitale, Pranjal A.
Bali, Kalika
Computation and Language
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.
title Towards Inducing Long-Context Abilities in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11382