Research

NLP

Facebook AI's WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission

October 31, 2019

Abstract

This paper describes Facebook AI's submission to the WAT 2019 Myanmar-English translation task. Our baseline systems are BPE-based transformer models. We explore methods to leverage monolingual data to improve generalization, including self-training, back-translation and their combination. We further improve results by using noisy channel re-ranking and ensembling. We demonstrate that these techniques can significantly improve not only a system trained with additional monolingual data, but even the baseline system trained exclusively on the provided small parallel dataset. Our system ranks first in both directions according to human evaluation and BLEU, with a gain of over 8 BLEU points above the second best system.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Peng-Jen Chen

Jiajun Shen

Matt Le

Vishrav Chaudhary

Ahmed El-Kishky

Guillaume Wenzek

Myle Ott

Marc’Aurelio Ranzato

Related Publications

March 17, 2026

NLP

Omnilingual MT: Machine Translation for 1,600 Languages

Omnilingual MT Team, Niyati Bafna, Ioannis Tsiamas, Mark Duppenthaler, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Alexandre Mourachko, Andrea Caciolai, Arina Turkatenko, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Belen Alastruey, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Chierh CHENG, Christophe Ropers, Cynthia Gao, David Dale, Edan Toledo, Eduardo Sánchez, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Holger Schwenk, Jean Maillard, Joe Chuang, João Maria Janeiro, Kevin Heffernan, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Mary Williamson, Nate Ekberg, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot, Rashel Moritz, Shireen Yates, Surya Parimi

March 17, 2026

March 17, 2026

Speech & Audio

Omnilingual SONAR: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Sentence Embeddings Bridging Massively Multilingual Text and Speech

Omnilingual SONAR Team, Ioannis Tsiamas, Yen Meng, Vivek Iyer, Guillem Ramirez, Jaehyeong Jo, Alexandre Mourachko, Yu-An Chung, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Belen Alastruey, Christophe Ropers, David Dale, Holger Schwenk, João Maria Janeiro, Kevin Heffernan, Loic Barrault, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot

March 17, 2026

February 27, 2026

Human & Machine Intelligence

Unified Vision–Language Modeling via Concept Space Alignment

Yifu Qiu, Holger Schwenk, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne

February 27, 2026

November 10, 2025

Speech & Audio

Omnilingual ASR: Open-Source Multilingual Speech Recognition for 1600+ Languages

Omnilingual ASR team, Skyler Wang, Ife Adebara, Michael Auli, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Zheng-Xin Yong, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Alexandre Mourachko, Alexander Erben, Yu-An Chung, Arina Turkatenko, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Caley Drooff, Can Balioglu, Chierh Cheng, Christophe Ropers, Cynthia Gao, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Gil Keren, Jean Maillard, Joe Chuang, Kehan Lyu, Kevin Chan, Mark Duppenthaler, Mary Williamson, Matthew Setzler, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Rashel Moritz, Safiyyah Saleem, Sagar Miglani, Shireen Yates, Vineel Pratap, Yen Meng

November 10, 2025

October 31, 2019

NLP

Facebook AI's WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission

Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matt Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato

October 31, 2019

March 14, 2019

NLP

On the Pitfalls of Measuring Emergent Communication | Facebook AI Research

Ryan Lowe, Jakob Foerster, Y-Lan Boureau, Joelle Pineau, Yann Dauphin

March 14, 2019

January 13, 2020

NLP

Scaling up online speech recognition using ConvNets | Facebook AI Research

Vineel Pratap, Qiantong Xu, Jacob Kahn, Gilad Avidov, Tatiana Likhomanenko, Awni Hannun, Vitaliy Liptchinsky, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ronan Collobert

January 13, 2020

April 30, 2018

NLP

Computer Vision

Mastering the Dungeon: Grounded Language Learning by Mechanical Turker Descent | Facebook AI Research

Zhilin Yang, Saizheng Zhang, Jack Urbanek, Will Feng, Alexander H. Miller, Arthur Szlam, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston

April 30, 2018

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.