Papers by Orhan Firat
Beyond Distillation: Task-level Mixture-of-Experts for Efficient Inference (2021.findings-emnlp)
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Sneha Kudugunta, Yanping Huang, Ankur Bapna, Maxim Krikun, Dmitry Lepikhin, Minh-Thang Luong, Orhan Firat
| Challenge: | Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a successful approach for scaling multilingual translation models to billions of parameters without a proportional increase in training computation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a task-level routing approach to extract smaller, ready-to-deploy sub-networks from large sparse models by ignoring distillation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on WMT and a web-scale dataset show that task-level routing outperforms token-level MoE models by +1.0 BLEU on average across 30 language pairs. |
A Large-Scale Study of Machine Translation in Turkic Languages (2021.emnlp-main)
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Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov, Anoop Babu, Duygu Ataman, Sherzod Kariev, Francis Tyers, Otabek Abduraufov, Mammad Hajili, Sardana Ivanova, Abror Khaytbaev, Antonio Laverghetta Jr., Bekhzodbek Moydinboyev, Esra Onal, Shaxnoza Pulatova, Ahsan Wahab, Orhan Firat, Sriram Chellappan
| Challenge: | a large corpus covering 22 Turkic languages is included in this paper . low-resource MT evaluation has traditionally focused on European languages due to limitations of available technology and resources. |
| Approach: | They present a case study of the practical application of MT in the Turkic language family . they propose to realize the gains of NMT for Turkic languages under high-resource to extremely low-resourced scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed study shows that the new methods can be used in the Turkic language family . the results highlight bottlenecks in building competitive systems . |
Explicit Alignment Objectives for Multilingual Bidirectional Encoders (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained cross-lingual encoders have proven impressively effective at enabling transfer-learning of NLP systems from high-resource languages to low-resourced languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to align multilingual encoders using two explicit alignment objectives that align the multilingual representations at different granularities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves gains of up to 1.1 average F1 score on sequence tagging and 27.3 average accuracy on retrieval over the XLM-R-large model. |
Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets (2022.tacl-1)
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Julia Kreutzer, Isaac Caswell, Lisa Wang, Ahsan Wahab, Daan van Esch, Nasanbayar Ulzii-Orshikh, Allahsera Tapo, Nishant Subramani, Artem Sokolov, Claytone Sikasote, Monang Setyawan, Supheakmungkol Sarin, Sokhar Samb, Benoît Sagot, Clara Rivera, Annette Rios, Isabel Papadimitriou, Salomey Osei, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Iroro Orife, Kelechi Ogueji, Andre Niyongabo Rubungo, Toan Q. Nguyen, Mathias Müller, André Müller, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Nanda Muhammad, Ayanda Mnyakeni, Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov, Tapiwanashe Matangira, Colin Leong, Nze Lawson, Sneha Kudugunta, Yacine Jernite, Mathias Jenny, Orhan Firat, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Sakhile Dlamini, Nisansa de Silva, Sakine Çabuk Ballı, Stella Biderman, Alessia Battisti, Ahmed Baruwa, Ankur Bapna, Pallavi Baljekar, Israel Abebe Azime, Ayodele Awokoya, Duygu Ataman, Orevaoghene Ahia, Oghenefego Ahia, Sweta Agrawal, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi
| Challenge: | Lower-resource corpora have systematic issues, including mislabeled or nonstandard/ambiguous language codes. |
| Approach: | They manually audit the quality of 205 language-specific corpora released with five major public datasets. |
| Outcome: | The results show that lower-resource corpora have systematic issues even for non-proficient speakers. |
FRMT: A Benchmark for Few-Shot Region-Aware Machine Translation (2023.tacl-1)
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Parker Riley, Timothy Dozat, Jan A. Botha, Xavier Garcia, Dan Garrette, Jason Riesa, Orhan Firat, Noah Constant
| Challenge: | a new dataset and evaluation benchmark for Few-shot Region-aware Machine Translation is presented . FRMT is a type of style-targeted translation that uses labeled training data to perform tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset and evaluation benchmark for Few-shot Region-aware Machine Translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on two translations from English into Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese. |
The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Recent Advances in Neural Machine Translation (P18-1)
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Mia Xu Chen, Orhan Firat, Ankur Bapna, Melvin Johnson, Wolfgang Macherey, George Foster, Llion Jones, Mike Schuster, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Ashish Vaswani, Jakob Uszkoreit, Lukasz Kaiser, Zhifeng Chen, Yonghui Wu, Macduff Hughes
| Challenge: | In recent years, the emergence of seq2seq models has revolutionized the field of machine translation by replacing traditional phrase-based approaches with neural machine translation (NMT) systems based on the encoder-decoder paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a convolutional seq2seq model to combine the strengths of the two approaches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architectures outperform the existing models on the WMT’14 benchmark dataset. |
Investigating Multilingual NMT Representations at Scale (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual Neural Machine Translation models have shown success in transfer learning settings, but their mode of transfer remains elusive. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a representation similarity framework to compare multilingual representations using a SVCCA representation similar to the previous work. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to compare representations across languages and layers. |
Simple, Scalable Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have led to significantly improved quality on Neural Machine Translation (NMT) however, performance on out-of-domain data or low resource languages remains poor. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet efficient approach for adapting pre-trained models to multiple tasks simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is on par with full fine-tuning on domain adaptation and massively multilingual NMT on a massively multilingual dataset. |
Multilingual Mix: Example Interpolation Improves Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to train multilingual models to learn the inductive bias of a shared vocabulary and set of parameters across languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual crossover encoder-decoder to fuse language pairs at an instance level to encourage sharing of input and output spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves quality on English-to-Many, Many-to English and zero-shot translation tasks from +0.5 BLEU up to +5.5 BLUE points. |
Multilingual Document-Level Translation Enables Zero-Shot Transfer From Sentences to Documents (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document-level neural machine translation (DocNMT) is a powerful tool for integrating cross-sentence context into translations. |
| Approach: | They explore whether and how contextual modeling in DocNMT is transferable via multilingual modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to transfer from teacher languages to student languages with no documents but sentence level data. |
BIG-Bench Extra Hard (2025.acl-long)
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Mehran Kazemi, Bahare Fatemi, Hritik Bansal, John Palowitch, Chrysovalantis Anastasiou, Sanket Vaibhav Mehta, Lalit K Jain, Virginia Aglietti, Disha Jindal, Peter Chen, Nishanth Dikkala, Gladys Tyen, Xin Liu, Uri Shalit, Silvia Chiappa, Kate Olszewska, Yi Tay, Vinh Q. Tran, Quoc V Le, Orhan Firat
| Challenge: | Current benchmarks for large language model reasoning focus on math and coding abilities, leaving a gap in evaluating broader reasoning proficiencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate general reasoning in large language models . they use BIG-Bench and its harder version BIG-Benefit Hard to assess general reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark pushes the boundaries of LLM reasoning evaluation. |
Training Deeper Neural Machine Translation Models with Transparent Attention (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing NMT models are shallow in comparison to convolutional models used for both text and vision tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to modify the attention mechanism to ease the optimization of deeper models by a simple modification to the seq2seq with attention paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves consistent gains of 0.7-1.1 BLEU on the benchmark WMT’14 English-German and WMT'15 Czech-English tasks. |
Harnessing Multilinguality in Unsupervised Machine Translation for Rare Languages (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised translation systems have impressive performance on resource-rich language pairs . however, in more realistic settings, unsupervised systems perform poorly . |
| Approach: | They propose a model for 5 low-resource languages that leverages monolingual and auxiliary parallel data from other high-resourced languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on low-resource languages . it also matches the current state- of-the art model for Nepali-English . |
XTREME-R: Towards More Challenging and Nuanced Multilingual Evaluation (2021.emnlp-main)
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Sebastian Ruder, Noah Constant, Jan Botha, Aditya Siddhant, Orhan Firat, Jinlan Fu, Pengfei Liu, Junjie Hu, Dan Garrette, Graham Neubig, Melvin Johnson
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multilingual natural language processing have improved performance on benchmarks such as XTREME and XGLUE by 13 points . however, improvements have been easier to achieve in some tasks than others . |
| Approach: | They extend XTREME to XTRAME-R, which includes ten natural language understanding tasks and covers 50 typologically diverse languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance on the XTREME multilingual benchmark by 13 points compared to human-level performance on English transfer learning. |
Towards Continual Learning for Multilingual Machine Translation via Vocabulary Substitution (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multilingual machine translation rely on training models on monolingual data for all languages in a multitask setup. |
| Approach: | They propose a vocabulary adaptation scheme to extend the language capacity of multilingual machine translation models by combining monolingual data with a dictionary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing models by preserving the original model and allowing for competitive performance even with only monolingual data. |
Revisiting Character-Based Neural Machine Translation with Capacity and Compression (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Translating characters instead of words or word-fragments can simplify the processing pipeline but results in longer sequences . |
| Approach: | They propose to use sequence-to-sequence architectures of sufficient depth to solve the problem . they also evaluate the performance versus computation time tradeoffs they offer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform models operating over word fragments in character-level NMT, the authors show . they also show that the proposed models do not match the performance of their deep character baseline model . |
Leveraging Monolingual Data with Self-Supervision for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
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Aditya Siddhant, Ankur Bapna, Yuan Cao, Orhan Firat, Mia Chen, Sneha Kudugunta, Naveen Arivazhagan, Yonghui Wu
| 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. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves translation quality of low-resource languages and zero-shot translation quality. |
Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual Neural Machine Translation models support translation from multiple source languages into multiple target languages. |
| Approach: | They perform extensive experiments in training massively multilingual NMT models involving up to 103 distinct languages and 204 translation directions simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art in low resource settings while supporting up to 59 languages in 116 translation directions. |
On the Importance of Word Boundaries in Character-level Neural Machine Translation (D19-56)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation models typically use a fixed-size lexical vocabulary . subword segmentation methods rely on statistical heuristics that lack any linguistic notion . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical decoding architecture for character-level NMT using subwords . they propose fewer parameters and a more efficient approach to perform translation at the level of words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can reach higher translation accuracy than the subword-level model with fewer parameters while maintaining longer-distance contextual and grammatical dependencies. |
Non-Parametric Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural Networks trained with gradient descent are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting due to parameter shift during the training process. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-parametric approach that relies on local phrase level similarities to retrieve neighboring phrases that are useful for translation even when overall sentence similarity is low. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs well on a heterogeneous dataset with WMT, IWSLT, JRC-Acquis and OpenSubtitles. |
GATITOS: Using a New Multilingual Lexicon for Low-resource Machine Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new study explores the effectiveness of bilingual lexica in machine translation models . cross-lingual vocabulary alignment is still highly imperfect in these models, despite the success of supervised and self-supervised training. |
| Approach: | They use a resource to improve translation performance on 200-language models . they show that lexica is more reliable than human-translated data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on 200-language translation models with lexical data augmentation . the proposed approach is open-source and has 168 tail languages . |