Héctor Murrieta Bello


2021

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Moses and the Character-Based Random Babbling Baseline: CoAStaL at AmericasNLP 2021 Shared Task
Marcel Bollmann | Rahul Aralikatte | Héctor Murrieta Bello | Daniel Hershcovich | Miryam de Lhoneux | Anders Søgaard
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas

We evaluated a range of neural machine translation techniques developed specifically for low-resource scenarios. Unsuccessfully. In the end, we submitted two runs: (i) a standard phrase-based model, and (ii) a random babbling baseline using character trigrams. We found that it was surprisingly hard to beat (i), in spite of this model being, in theory, a bad fit for polysynthetic languages; and more interestingly, that (ii) was better than several of the submitted systems, highlighting how difficult low-resource machine translation for polysynthetic languages is.