To Optimize, or Not to Optimize, That Is the Question: TelU-KU Models for WMT21 Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation

AbstractWe describe TelU-KU models of large-scale multilingual machine translation for five Southeast Asian languages: Javanese, Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Tamil, and English. We explore a variation of hyperparameters of flores101_mm100_175M model using random search with 10% of datasets to improve BLEU scores of all thirty language pairs. We submitted two models, TelU-KU-175M and TelU-KU- 175M_HPO, with average BLEU scores of 12.46 and 13.19, respectively. Our models show improvement in most language pairs after optimizing the hyperparameters. We also identified three language pairs that obtained a BLEU score of more than 15 while using less than 70 sentences of the training dataset: Indonesian-Tagalog, Tagalog-Indonesian, and Malay-Tagalog.