Training state-of-the-art large language models requires vast amounts of clean and diverse textual data. However, building suitable multilingual datasets remains a challenge. In this work, we present HPLT v2, a collection of high-quality multilingual monolingual and parallel corpora, extending prior work of the HPLT project. The monolingual portion of the data contains 8T tokens covering 193 languages, while the parallel data contains 380M sentence pairs covering 51 languages. We document the entire data pipeline and release the code to reproduce it. We provide extensive analysis of the quality and characteristics of our data. Finally, we evaluate the performance of language models and machine translation systems trained on HPLT v2, demonstrating its value.

We present fast Neural Machine Translation models for 17 diverse languages, developed using Sequence-level Knowledge Distillation. Our selected languages span multiple language families and scripts, including low-resource languages. The distilled models achieve comparable performance while being 10x times faster than transformer-base and 35x times faster than transformer-big architectures. Our experiments reveal that teacher model quality and capacity strongly influence the distillation success, as well as the language script. We also explore the effectiveness of multilingual students. We release publicly our code and models in our Github repository: anonymised.