scholarly journals Revisiting Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation: A Case Study

Author(s):  
Rico Sennrich ◽  
Biao Zhang
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur T. Estrella ◽  
João B. O. Souza Filho

Neural machine translation (NMT) nowadays requires an increasing amount of data and computational power, so succeeding in this task with limited data and using a single GPU might be challenging. Strategies such as the use of pre-trained word embeddings, subword embeddings, and data augmentation solutions can potentially address some issues faced in low-resource experimental settings, but their impact on the quality of translations is unclear. This work evaluates some of these strategies on two low-resource experiments beyond just reporting BLEU: errors are categorized on the Portuguese-English pair with the help of a translator, considering semantic and syntactic aspects. The BPE subword approach has shown to be the most effective solution, allowing a BLEU increase of 59% p.p. compared to the standard Transformer.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 325-346
Author(s):  
John E. Ortega ◽  
Richard Castro Mamani ◽  
Kyunghyun Cho

Author(s):  
Rashmini Naranpanawa ◽  
Ravinga Perera ◽  
Thilakshi Fonseka ◽  
Uthayasanker Thayasivam

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Zhiqiang Yu ◽  
Yuxin Huang ◽  
Junjun Guo

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Sahinur Rahman Laskar ◽  
Abdullah Faiz Ur Rahman Khilji ◽  
Partha Pakray ◽  
Sivaji Bandyopadhyay

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 503-514
Author(s):  
Nier Wu ◽  
Hongxu Hou ◽  
Ziyue Guo ◽  
Wei Zheng

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