gators: BM25-Augmented Many-Shot Translation for Low-Resource North-Eastern Indian Languages

Aashish Dhawan, Christopher Driggers-Ellis, Dzmitry Kasinets, Christan Grant, Zhe Wang


Abstract
This paper describes the University of Florida gators submission to the WMT26 Low-Resource Indic Language Translation shared task. We adapt the retrieval-augmented many-shot translation pipeline from our AmericasNLP 2026 system to translate between English and eleven North-Eastern Indian languages in both directions. At inference time, BM25 retrieves the most similar parallel examples from a language-specific training bank, and Gemini 2.5 Flash translates the input conditioned on these examples. No model fine-tuning is involved. Training banks combine official WMT26 data with publicly available corpora such as Samanantar and prior WMT shared task releases. A grid search over retrieval count r and development exemplar count d across all 22 language-direction pairs selects the best configuration for each submission.
Anthology ID:
2026.wmt-main.150
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Barry Haddow, Tom Kocmi, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz
Venues:
WMT | WS
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2111–2123
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.150/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aashish Dhawan, Christopher Driggers-Ellis, Dzmitry Kasinets, Christan Grant, and Zhe Wang. 2026. gators: BM25-Augmented Many-Shot Translation for Low-Resource North-Eastern Indian Languages. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation, pages 2111–2123, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
gators: BM25-Augmented Many-Shot Translation for Low-Resource North-Eastern Indian Languages (Dhawan et al., WMT 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.150.pdf