scholarly journals Introduction to the Special Issue on Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chao-Hong Liu ◽  
Alina Karakanta ◽  
Audrey N. Tong ◽  
Oleg Aulov ◽  
Ian M. Soboroff ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Low Resource

Neural machine translation with a polysynthetic low resource language

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 325-346
Author(s):  
John E. Ortega ◽  
Richard Castro Mamani ◽  
Kyunghyun Cho
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Low Resource

Analyzing Subword Techniques to Improve English to Sinhala Neural Machine Translation

2021 ◽  
pp. 2050017
Author(s):  
Rashmini Naranpanawa ◽  
Ravinga Perera ◽  
Thilakshi Fonseka ◽  
Uthayasanker Thayasivam
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Translation System ◽  
Rare Word ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Morphologically Rich Languages

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a remarkable approach which performs much better than the Statistical machine translation (SMT) models when there is an abundance of parallel corpus. However, vanilla NMT is primarily based upon word-level with a fixed vocabulary. Therefore, low resource morphologically rich languages such as Sinhala are mostly affected by the out of vocabulary (OOV) and Rare word problems. Recent advancements in subword techniques have opened up opportunities for low resource communities by enabling open vocabulary translation. In this paper, we extend our recently published state-of-the-art EN-SI translation system using the transformer and explore standard subword techniques on top of it to identify which subword approach has a greater effect on English Sinhala language pair. Our models demonstrate that subword segmentation strategies along with the state-of-the-art NMT can perform remarkably when translating English sentences into a rich morphology language regardless of a large parallel corpus.

Improving thai-lao neural machine translation with similarity lexicon

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Zhiqiang Yu ◽  
Yuxin Huang ◽  
Junjun Guo
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Decoder Architecture ◽  
Baseline System ◽  
Input Sentence ◽  
Resource Conditions ◽  
Language Pair

It has been shown that the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) drops starkly in low-resource conditions. Thai-Lao is a typical low-resource language pair of tiny parallel corpus, leading to suboptimal NMT performance on it. However, Thai and Lao have considerable similarities in linguistic morphology and have bilingual lexicon which is relatively easy to obtain. To use this feature, we first build a bilingual similarity lexicon composed of pairs of similar words. Then we propose a novel NMT architecture to leverage the similarity between Thai and Lao. Specifically, besides the prevailing sentence encoder, we introduce an extra similarity lexicon encoder into the conventional encoder-decoder architecture, by which the semantic information carried by the similarity lexicon can be represented. We further provide a simple mechanism in the decoder to balance the information representations delivered from the input sentence and the similarity lexicon. Our approach can fully exploit linguistic similarity carried by the similarity lexicon to improve translation quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art Transformer baseline system and previous similar works.

Improved neural machine translation for low-resource English–Assamese pair

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Sahinur Rahman Laskar ◽  
Abdullah Faiz Ur Rahman Khilji ◽  
Partha Pakray ◽  
Sivaji Bandyopadhyay
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Data Augmentation ◽  
Language Translation ◽  
Linguistically Diverse ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Parallel Data ◽  
The World ◽  
Translation Accuracy ◽  
Vocabulary Problems

Language translation is essential to bring the world closer and plays a significant part in building a community among people of different linguistic backgrounds. Machine translation dramatically helps in removing the language barrier and allows easier communication among linguistically diverse communities. Due to the unavailability of resources, major languages of the world are accounted as low-resource languages. This leads to a challenging task of automating translation among various such languages to benefit indigenous speakers. This article investigates neural machine translation for the English–Assamese resource-poor language pair by tackling insufficient data and out-of-vocabulary problems. We have also proposed an approach of data augmentation-based NMT, which exploits synthetic parallel data and shows significantly improved translation accuracy for English-to-Assamese and Assamese-to-English translation and obtained state-of-the-art results.

scholarly journals End-to-end statistical machine translation with zero or small parallel texts

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANN IRVINE ◽  
CHRIS CALLISON-BURCH
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Bilingual Lexicon ◽  
Orthographic Similarity ◽  
Discriminative Model ◽  
End To End ◽  
Parallel Texts

AbstractWe use bilingual lexicon induction techniques, which learn translations from monolingual texts in two languages, to build an end-to-end statistical machine translation (SMT) system without the use of any bilingual sentence-aligned parallel corpora. We present detailed analysis of the accuracy of bilingual lexicon induction, and show how a discriminative model can be used to combine various signals of translation equivalence (like contextual similarity, temporal similarity, orthographic similarity and topic similarity). Our discriminative model produces higher accuracy translations than previous bilingual lexicon induction techniques. We reuse these signals of translation equivalence as features on a phrase-based SMT system. These monolingually estimated features enhance low resource SMT systems in addition to allowing end-to-end machine translation without parallel corpora.

scholarly journals Recent advances in Apertium, a free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform for low-resource languages

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanmai Khanna ◽  
Jonathan N. Washington ◽  
Francis M. Tyers ◽  
Sevilay Bayatlı ◽  
Daniel G. Swanson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Lexical Selection ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Language Technology ◽  
Language Data ◽  
Recursive Structures ◽  
Platform Translation ◽  
Free Open Source

AbstractThis paper presents an overview of Apertium, a free and open-source rule-based machine translation platform. Translation in Apertium happens through a pipeline of modular tools, and the platform continues to be improved as more language pairs are added. Several advances have been implemented since the last publication, including some new optional modules: a module that allows rules to process recursive structures at the structural transfer stage, a module that deals with contiguous and discontiguous multi-word expressions, and a module that resolves anaphora to aid translation. Also highlighted is the hybridisation of Apertium through statistical modules that augment the pipeline, and statistical methods that augment existing modules. This includes morphological disambiguation, weighted structural transfer, and lexical selection modules that learn from limited data. The paper also discusses how a platform like Apertium can be a critical part of access to language technology for so-called low-resource languages, which might be ignored or deemed unapproachable by popular corpus-based translation technologies. Finally, the paper presents some of the released and unreleased language pairs, concluding with a brief look at some supplementary Apertium tools that prove valuable to users as well as language developers. All Apertium-related code, including language data, is free/open-source and available at https://github.com/apertium.

scholarly journals Pseudotext Injection and Advance Filtering of Low-Resource Corpus for Neural Machine Translation

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Michael Adjeisah ◽  
Guohua Liu ◽  
Douglas Omwenga Nyabuga ◽  
Richard Nuetey Nortey ◽  
Jinling Song
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Similarity Metrics ◽  
Mahalanobis Distances ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Sentence Level

Scaling natural language processing (NLP) to low-resourced languages to improve machine translation (MT) performance remains enigmatic. This research contributes to the domain on a low-resource English-Twi translation based on filtered synthetic-parallel corpora. It is often perplexing to learn and understand what a good-quality corpus looks like in low-resource conditions, mainly where the target corpus is the only sample text of the parallel language. To improve the MT performance in such low-resource language pairs, we propose to expand the training data by injecting synthetic-parallel corpus obtained by translating a monolingual corpus from the target language based on bootstrapping with different parameter settings. Furthermore, we performed unsupervised measurements on each sentence pair engaging squared Mahalanobis distances, a filtering technique that predicts sentence parallelism. Additionally, we extensively use three different sentence-level similarity metrics after round-trip translation. Experimental results on a diverse amount of available parallel corpus demonstrate that injecting pseudoparallel corpus and extensive filtering with sentence-level similarity metrics significantly improves the original out-of-the-box MT systems for low-resource language pairs. Compared with existing improvements on the same original framework under the same structure, our approach exhibits tremendous developments in BLEU and TER scores.

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