Challenge: Neural machine translation (NMT) is a well-known and expensive task.
Approach: They propose a method to use target-side monolingual data for neural machine translation and propose 'synthetic bitext' they propose generating synthetic bitext by translating monolingual into the other domain using models pretrained on genuine bitext.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on WMT16, WMT17, WTM18 EnglishGerman translations and WTM19 GermanFrench translations.

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Understanding Back-Translation at Scale (D18-1)

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Challenge: An effective method to improve neural machine translation with monolingual data is to augment the parallel training corpus with back-translations of target language sentences.
Approach: They propose to augment parallel training corpus with back-translations of target language sentences to improve neural machine translation with monolingual data.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves a state-of-the-art of 35 BLEU on the WMT’14 English-German test set.
AugVic: Exploiting BiText Vicinity for Low-Resource NMT (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems often exhibit poor performance due to the lack of large bitext training corpora in low-resource languages.
Approach: They propose a data augmentation framework which exploits the vicinal samples of the given bitext without using extra monolingual data explicitly.
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Can Synthetic Translations Improve Bitext Quality? (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Synthetic translations have been used for a wide range of NLP tasks, but it remains unclear how they differ from naturally occurring data.
Approach: They propose to use a semantic equivalence classifier to improve bitext quality without additional bilingual supervision to replace the originals.
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Bridging the Gap between Training and Inference for Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)

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Challenge: Neural Machine Translation generates target words sequentially while at inference it has to generate the entire sequence from scratch.
Approach: They propose to use ground truth and inference to generate target words sequentially while at inference it has to generate the entire sequence from scratch.
Outcome: Experiments on Chinese->English and WMT’14 English->German translation tasks show that the proposed model can achieve significant improvements on multiple datasets.
BitextEdit: Automatic Bitext Editing for Improved Low-Resource Machine Translation (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to improve Neural Machine Translation (NMT) for lowresource languages are often trained on heuristically aligned or automatically mined data.
Approach: They propose to filter out imperfect translations that yield unreliable training signals for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) instead, they propose to refine mined bitexts by automatic editing .
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Enhancing Neural Machine Translation Through Target Language Data: A kNN-LM Approach for Domain Adaptation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Neural machine translation (NMT) has made significant progress in recent years, yet often suffers from translating in new domains, which is called domain adaptation.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages semantically similar target language sentences in the kNN framework and generates a probability distribution over these sentences during decoding.
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Leveraging Monolingual Data with Self-Supervision for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing multilingual NMT approaches do not utilize the abundance of monolingual data, especially in low-resource languages.
Approach: They propose to combine monolingual data with self-supervision to pre-train translation models and fine-tune on small amounts of supervised data.
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Enhancing Large Language Models for Document-Level Translation Post-Editing Using Monolingual Data (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have excellent performance in many tasks, but they still face challenges in document translation.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages the capabilities of Large Language Models to optimize document translation using only monolingual data.
Outcome: The proposed method improves translation quality and improves contextual consistency in document translation using only monolingual data.
Exploiting Target Language Data for Neural Machine Translation Beyond Back Translation (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Neural Machine Translation (NMT) encounters challenges when translating in new domains and low-resource languages.
Approach: They propose a variant of k-nearest neighbor machine translation that utilizes target language data by constructing a pseudo datastore.
Outcome: The proposed method exhibits strong domain adaptation capability in both high-resource and low-resourced machine translation.
Unsupervised Extraction of Partial Translations for Neural Machine Translation (N19-1)

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Challenge: Neural machine translation systems usually require a large quantity of bilingual parallel data for training.
Approach: They propose an algorithm for extracting from monolingual data what they call partial translations . partial translation is a pair of source and target sentences that contain sequences of tokens that are translations of each other.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm extracts from monolingual data what we call partial translations . it takes only source and target monolingual datasets as input .

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