A Comparison of Different NMT Approaches to Low-Resource Dutch-Albanian Machine Translation

Arbnor Rama, Eva Vanmassenhove


Abstract
Low-resource languages can be understood as languages that are more scarce, less studied, less privileged, less commonly taught and for which there are less resources available (Singh, 2008; Cieri et al., 2016; Magueresse et al., 2020). Natural Language Processing (NLP) research and technology mainly focuses on those languages for which there are large data sets available. To illustrate differences in data availability: there are 6 million Wikipedia articles available for English, 2 million for Dutch, and merely 82 thousand for Albanian. The scarce data issue becomes increasingly apparent when large parallel data sets are required for applications such as Neural Machine Translation (NMT). In this work, we investigate to what extent translation between Albanian (SQ) and Dutch (NL) is possible comparing a one-to-one (SQ↔AL) model, a low-resource pivot-based approach (English (EN) as pivot) and a zero-shot translation (ZST) (Johnson et al., 2016; Mattoni et al., 2017) system. From our experiments, it results that the EN-pivot-model outperforms both the direct one-to-one and the ZST model. Since often, small amounts of parallel data are available for low-resource languages or settings, experiments were conducted using small sets of parallel NL↔SQ data. The ZST appeared to be the worst performing models. Even when the available parallel data (NL↔SQ) was added, i.e. in a few-shot setting (FST), it remained the worst performing system according to the automatic (BLEU and TER) and human evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2021.mtsummit-loresmt.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Virtual
Editors:
John Ortega, Atul Kr. Ojha, Katharina Kann, Chao-Hong Liu
Venue:
LoResMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Note:
Pages:
68–77
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.mtsummit-loresmt.7
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arbnor Rama and Eva Vanmassenhove. 2021. A Comparison of Different NMT Approaches to Low-Resource Dutch-Albanian Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT2021), pages 68–77, Virtual. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
A Comparison of Different NMT Approaches to Low-Resource Dutch-Albanian Machine Translation (Rama & Vanmassenhove, LoResMT 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.mtsummit-loresmt.7.pdf
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