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workshop paper
Enhancing Low-Resource NMT with a Multilingual Encoder and Knowledge Distillation: A Case Study
keywords:
nmt
low-resource
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) remains a formidable challenge, especially when dealing with low-resource languages. Pre-trained sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) multi-lingual models, such as mBART-50, have demonstrated impressive performance in various low-resource NMT tasks. However, their pre-training has been confined to 50 languages, leaving out support for numerous low-resource languages, particularly those spoken in the Indian subcontinent. Expanding mBART-50's language support requires complex pre-training, risking performance decline due to catastrophic forgetting. Considering these expanding challenges, this paper explores a framework that leverages the benefits of a pre-trained language model along with knowledge distillation in a seq2seq architecture to facilitate translation for low-resource languages, including those not endorsed by mBART-50. The proposed framework employs a multilingual encoder-based seq2seq model as the foundational architecture and subsequently uses complementary knowledge distillation techniques to mitigate the impact of imbalanced training. Our framework is evaluated on six low-resource Indic language pairs, yielding significant BLEU-4 and chrF improvements over baselines. Further, we conduct human evaluation confirm effectiveness of our approach.