From Priest to Doctor: Domain Adaptation for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation

Ali Marashian, Enora Rice, Luke Gessler, Alexis Palmer, Katharina von der Wense


Abstract
Many of the world’s languages have insufficient data to train high-performing general neural machine translation (NMT) models, let alone domain-specific models, and often the only available parallel data are small amounts of religious texts. Hence, domain adaptation (DA) is a crucial issue faced by contemporary NMT and has, so far, been underexplored for low-resource languages. In this paper, we evaluate a set of methods from both low-resource NMT and DA in a realistic setting, in which we aim to translate between a high-resource and a low-resource language with access to only: a) parallel Bible data, b) a bilingual dictionary, and c) a monolingual target-domain corpus in the high-resource language. Our results show that the effectiveness of the tested methods varies, with the simplest one, DALI, being most effective. We follow up with a small human evaluation of DALI, which shows that there is still a need for more careful investigation of how to accomplish DA for low-resource NMT.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.472
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7087–7098
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.472/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ali Marashian, Enora Rice, Luke Gessler, Alexis Palmer, and Katharina von der Wense. 2025. From Priest to Doctor: Domain Adaptation for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 7087–7098, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Priest to Doctor: Domain Adaptation for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (Marashian et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.472.pdf