Fine-Tuning Methods and Dataset Structures for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation: A Kazakh–English–Russian Case Study in the IT Domain


Kozhirbayev Z. Yessenbayev Z.
August 2025Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)

Electronics (Switzerland)
2025#14Issue 15

This study explores fine-tuning methods and dataset structures for multilingual neural machine translation using the No Language Left Behind model, with a case study on Kazakh, English, and Russian. We compare single-stage and two-stage fine-tuning approaches, as well as triplet versus non-triplet dataset configurations, to improve translation quality. A high-quality, 50,000-triplet dataset in information technology domain, manually translated and expert-validated, serves as the in-domain benchmark, complemented by out-of-domain corpora like KazParC. Evaluations using BLEU, chrF, METEOR, and TER metrics reveal that single-stage fine-tuning excels for low-resource pairs (e.g., 0.48 BLEU, 0.77 chrF for Kazakh → Russian), while two-stage fine-tuning benefits high-resource pairs (Russian → English). Triplet datasets improve cross-linguistic consistency compared with non-triplet structures. Our reproducible framework offers practical guidance for adapting neural machine translation to technical domains and low-resource languages.

fine-tuning setup , IT domain , Kazakh–English–Russian , multilingual machine translation , NLLB , triplet dataset

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National Laboratory Astana, Nazarbayev University, Astana, 010000, Kazakhstan
Computer Science Department, School of Computing and Creative Arts, Bina Nusantara University, Jakarta, 10110, Indonesia

National Laboratory Astana
Computer Science Department

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