Language Model Priors and Data Augmentation Strategies for Low-resource Machine Translation: A Case Study Using Finnish to Northern Sámi

Jonne Sälevä, Constantine Lignos


Abstract
We investigate ways of using monolingual data in both the source and target languages for improving low-resource machine translation. As a case study, we experiment with translation from Finnish to Northern Sámi.Our experiments show that while conventional backtranslation remains a strong contender, using synthetic target-side data when training backtranslation models can be helpful as well.We also show that monolingual data can be used to train a language model which can act as a regularizer without any augmentation of parallel data.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.768
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12949–12956
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.768
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Cite (ACL):
Jonne Sälevä and Constantine Lignos. 2024. Language Model Priors and Data Augmentation Strategies for Low-resource Machine Translation: A Case Study Using Finnish to Northern Sámi. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 12949–12956, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Language Model Priors and Data Augmentation Strategies for Low-resource Machine Translation: A Case Study Using Finnish to Northern Sámi (Sälevä & Lignos, Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.768.pdf