Leveraging shared learning through Massively Multilingual Models, state-of-the-art Machine translation (MT) models are often able to adapt to the paucity of data for low-resource languages. However, this performance comes at the cost of significantly bloated models which aren’t practically deployable. Knowledge Distillation is one popular technique to develop competitive lightweight models: In this work, we first evaluate its use in compressing MT models, focusing specifically on languages with extremely limited training data. Through our analysis across 8 languages, we find that the variance in the performance of the distilled models due to their dependence on priors including the amount of synthetic data used for distillation, the student architecture, training hyper-parameters and confidence of the teacher models, makes distillation a brittle compression mechanism. To mitigate this, we further explore the use of post-training quantization for the compression of these models. Here, we find that while Distillation provides gains across some low-resource languages, Quantization provides more consistent performance trends for the entire range of languages, especially the lowest-resource languages in our target set.

Code-mixing is common in multilingual communities around the world, and processing it is challenging due to the lack of labeled and unlabeled data. We describe a tool that can automatically generate code-mixed data given parallel data in two languages. We implement two linguistic theories of code-mixing, the Equivalence Constraint theory and the Matrix Language theory to generate all possible code-mixed sentences in the language-pair, followed by sampling of the generated data to generate natural code-mixed sentences. The toolkit provides three modes: a batch mode, an interactive library mode and a web-interface to address the needs of researchers, linguists and language experts. The toolkit can be used to generate unlabeled text data for pre-trained models, as well as visualize linguistic theories of code-mixing. We plan to release the toolkit as open source and extend it by adding more implementations of linguistic theories, visualization techniques and better sampling techniques. We expect that the release of this toolkit will help facilitate more research in code-mixing in diverse language pairs.