Ketaki Shetye
2024
MTNLP-IIITH: Machine Translation for Low-Resource Indic Languages
Abhinav P M
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Ketaki Shetye
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Parameswari Krishnamurthy
Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation
Machine Translation for low-resource languages presents significant challenges, primarily due to limited data availability. We have a baseline model and a primary model. For the baseline model, we first fine-tune the mBART model (mbart-large-50-many-to-many-mmt) for the language pairs English-Khasi, Khasi-English, English-Manipuri, and Manipuri-English. We then augment the dataset by back-translating from Indic languages to English. To enhance data quality, we fine-tune the LaBSE model specifically for Khasi and Manipuri, generating sentence embeddings and applying a cosine similarity threshold of 0.84 to filter out low-quality back-translations. The filtered data is combined with the original training data and used to further fine-tune the mBART model, creating our primary model. The results show that the primary model slightly outperforms the baseline model, with the best performance achieved by the English-to-Khasi (en-kh) primary model, which recorded a BLEU score of 0.0492, a chrF score of 0.3316, and a METEOR score of 0.2589 (on a scale of 0 to 1), with similar results for other language pairs.