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No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation

2022/07/11 by Nllb Team, Marta R. Costa-jussà, NLLB Team +82 · 1 voice · 261 citations
Computer Science · #68T50 #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #I.2.7 #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Text Readability and Simplification #Topic Modeling #acm:68T50 #cs.AI #cs.CL #msc:68T50

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2207.04672

190 pages

openalex publication_date 2022/07/11 · arxiv created 2022/08/25 · arxiv updated 2022/08/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

Driven by the goal of eradicating language barriers on a global scale, machine translation has solidified itself as a key focus of artificial intelligence research today. However, such efforts have coalesced around a small subset of languages, leaving behind the vast majority of mostly low-resource languages. What does it take to break the 200 language barrier while ensuring safe, high quality results, all while keeping ethical considerations in mind? In No Language Left Behind, we took on this challenge by first contextualizing the need for low-resource language translation support through exploratory interviews with native speakers. Then, we created datasets and models aimed at narrowing the performance gap between low and high-resource languages. More specifically, we developed a conditional compute model based on Sparsely Gated Mixture of Experts that is trained on data obtained with novel and effective data mining techniques tailored for low-resource languages. We propose multiple architectural and training improvements to counteract overfitting while training on thousands of tasks. Critically, we evaluated the performance of over 40,000 different translation directions using a human-translated benchmark, Flores-200, and combined human evaluation with a novel toxicity benchmark covering all languages in Flores-200 to assess translation safety. Our model achieves an improvement of 44% BLEU relative to the previous state-of-the-art, laying important groundwork towards realizing a universal translation system. Finally, we open source all contributions described in this work, accessible at https://github.com/facebookresearch/fairseq/tree/nllb.

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