aina-translator-ca-de

Projecte Aina’s Catalan-German machine translation model

Model description

This model was trained from scratch using the Fairseq toolkit on a combination of datasets comprising both Catalan-German data sourced from Opus, and additional datasets where synthetic Catalan was generated from the Spanish side of Spanish-Germancorpora using Projecte Aina’s Spanish-Catalan model. This gave a total of approximately 100 million sentence pairs. The model is evaluated on the Flores, NTEU and NTREX evaluation sets.  

Intended uses and limitations

You can use this model for machine translation from Catalan to German.

How to use

Usage

Required libraries:

pip install ctranslate2 pyonmttok

Translate a sentence using python

import ctranslate2
import pyonmttok
from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
model_dir = snapshot_download(repo_id="projecte-aina/aina-translator-ca-de", revision="main")

tokenizer=pyonmttok.Tokenizer(mode="none", sp_model_path = model_dir + "/spm.50k.model")
tokenized=tokenizer.tokenize("Benvingut al projecte Aina!")

translator = ctranslate2.Translator(model_dir)
translated = translator.translate_batch([tokenized[0]])
print(tokenizer.detokenize(translated[0][0]['tokens']))

Limitations and bias

At the time of submission, no measures have been taken to estimate the bias and toxicity embedded in the model. However, we are well aware that our models may be biased. We intend to conduct research in these areas in the future, and if completed, this model card will be updated.

Training

Training data

The Catalan-German data collected from the web was a combination of the following datasets:

All corpora except Europarl and Tilde were collected from Opus. The Europarl and Tilde corpora are synthetic parallel corpora created from the original Spanish-German corpora by SoftCatalà. Once all available Catalan-German data had been collected, additional synthetic Catalan data was created from the Spanish side of Spanish-German corpora using Projecte Aina’s Spanish-Catalan model.

Training procedure

Data preparation

All datasets are deduplicated and filtered to remove any sentence pairs with a cosine similarity of less than 0.75. This is done using sentence embeddings calculated using LaBSE. The filtered datasets are then concatenated and before training the punctuation is normalized using a modified version of the join-single-file.py script from SoftCatalà

Tokenization

All data is tokenized using sentencepiece, with a 50 thousand token sentencepiece model learned from the combination of all filtered training data. This model is included.

Hyperparameters

The model is based on the Transformer-XLarge proposed by Subramanian et al. The following hyperparameters were set on the Fairseq toolkit:

The model was trained for a total of 22.000 updates. Weights were saved every 1000 updates and reported results are the average of the last 3 checkpoints.

Evaluation

Variable and metrics

We use the BLEU score for evaluation on the Flores-101 and NTREX test sets.

Evaluation results

Below are the evaluation results on the machine translation from Catalan to German compared to Softcatalà and Google Translate:

Additional information

Author

The Language Technologies Unit from Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Contact

For further information, please send an email to [email protected].

Copyright

Copyright(c) 2023 by Language Technologies Unit, Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

License

Apache License, Version 2.0

Funding

This work has been promoted and financed by the Generalitat de Catalunya through the Aina project.

Disclaimer

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The model published in this repository is intended for a generalist purpose and is available to third parties under a permissive Apache License, Version 2.0.

Be aware that the model may have biases and/or any other undesirable distortions.

When third parties deploy or provide systems and/or services to other parties using this model (or any system based on it) or become users of the model, they should note that it is their responsibility to mitigate the risks arising from its use and, in any event, to comply with applicable regulations, including regulations regarding the use of Artificial Intelligence.

In no event shall the owner and creator of the model (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) be liable for any results arising from the use made by third parties.

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