Leveraging Mandarin as a Pivot Language for Low-Resource Machine Translation between Cantonese and English

King Yiu Suen, Rudolf Chow, Albert Y.S. Lam


Abstract
Cantonese, the second most prevalent Chinese dialect after Mandarin, has been relatively overlooked in machine translation (MT) due to a scarcity of bilingual resources. In this paper, we propose to leverage Mandarin, a high-resource language, as a pivot language for translating between Cantonese and English. Our method utilizes transfer learning from pre-trained Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformer (BART) models to initialize auxiliary source-pivot and pivot-target MT models. The parameters of the trained auxiliary models are then used to initialize the source-target model. Based on our experiments, our proposed method outperforms several baseline initialization strategies, naive pivot translation, and two commercial translation systems in both translation directions.
Anthology ID:
2024.loresmt-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the The Seventh Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2024)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Atul Kr. Ojha, Chao-hong Liu, Ekaterina Vylomova, Flammie Pirinen, Jade Abbott, Jonathan Washington, Nathaniel Oco, Valentin Malykh, Varvara Logacheva, Xiaobing Zhao
Venues:
LoResMT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
74–84
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.loresmt-1.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
King Yiu Suen, Rudolf Chow, and Albert Y.S. Lam. 2024. Leveraging Mandarin as a Pivot Language for Low-Resource Machine Translation between Cantonese and English. In Proceedings of the The Seventh Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2024), pages 74–84, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging Mandarin as a Pivot Language for Low-Resource Machine Translation between Cantonese and English (Suen et al., LoResMT-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.loresmt-1.8.pdf