Existing approaches to multilingual text detoxification are hampered by the scarcity of parallel multilingual datasets. In this work, we introduce a pipeline for the generation of multilingual parallel detoxification data. We also introduce SynthDetoxM, a manually collected and synthetically generated multilingual parallel text detoxification dataset comprising 16,000 high-quality detoxification sentence pairs across German, French, Spanish and Russian. The data was sourced from different toxicity evaluation datasets and then rewritten with nine modern open-source LLMs in few-shot setting. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on the produced synthetic datasets have superior performance to those trained on the human-annotated MultiParaDetox dataset even in data limited setting. Models trained on SynthDetoxM outperform all evaluated LLMs in few-shot setting. We release our dataset and code to help further research in multilingual text detoxification.

This paper proposes SkipCLM, a novel method for improving multilingual machine translation in Decoder Transformers. We augment contrastive learning for cross-lingual alignment with a trainable skip connection to preserve information crucial for accurate target language generation. Experiments with XGLM-564M on the Flores-101 benchmark demonstrate improved performance, particularly for en-de and en-zh direction translations, compared to direct sequence-to-sequence training and existing contrastive learning methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/s-nlp/skipclm.