SMaLL-100: Introducing Shallow Multilingual Machine Translation Model for Low-Resource Languages

Abstract

In recent years, multilingual machine translation models have achieved promising performance on low-resource language pairs by sharing information between similar languages, thus enabling zero-shot translation. To overcome the “curse of multilinguality”, these models often opt for scaling up the number of parameters, which makes their use in resource-constrained environments challenging. We introduce SMaLL-100, a distilled version of the M2M-100(12B) model, a massively multilingual machine translation model covering 100 languages. SMaLL-100 outperforms previous massively multilingual models of comparable sizes on FLORES-101, Tatoeba, and TICO-19 low-resource benchmarks while improving inference latency and memory usage. Additionally, our model achieves comparable results to M2M-100 (1.2B), while being 3.6x smaller and 4.3x faster at inference.

Publication
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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