nllb translation

NLLB-200

This is the model card of NLLB-200's 3.3B variant.

Here are the metrics for that particular checkpoint.

Intended Use

Metrics

• Model performance measures: NLLB-200 model was evaluated using BLEU, spBLEU, and chrF++ metrics widely adopted by machine translation community. Additionally, we performed human evaluation with the XSTS protocol and measured the toxicity of the generated translations.

Evaluation Data

Training Data

• We used parallel multilingual data from a variety of sources to train the model. We provide detailed report on data selection and construction process in Section 5 in the paper. We also used monolingual data constructed from Common Crawl. We provide more details in Section 5.2.

Ethical Considerations

• In this work, we took a reflexive approach in technological development to ensure that we prioritize human users and minimize risks that could be transferred to them. While we reflect on our ethical considerations throughout the article, here are some additional points to highlight. For one, many languages chosen for this study are low-resource languages, with a heavy emphasis on African languages. While quality translation could improve education and information access in many in these communities, such an access could also make groups with lower levels of digital literacy more vulnerable to misinformation or online scams. The latter scenarios could arise if bad actors misappropriate our work for nefarious activities, which we conceive as an example of unintended use. Regarding data acquisition, the training data used for model development were mined from various publicly available sources on the web. Although we invested heavily in data cleaning, personally identifiable information may not be entirely eliminated. Finally, although we did our best to optimize for translation quality, mistranslations produced by the model could remain. Although the odds are low, this could have adverse impact on those who rely on these translations to make important decisions (particularly when related to health and safety).

Caveats and Recommendations

• Our model has been tested on the Wikimedia domain with limited investigation on other domains supported in NLLB-MD. In addition, the supported languages may have variations that our model is not capturing. Users should make appropriate assessments.

Carbon Footprint Details

• The carbon dioxide (CO2e) estimate is reported in Section 8.8.