In this paper, we describe our system for the WMT 24 shared task of Low-Resource Indic Language Translation. We consider eng↔{as, kha, lus, mni} as participating language pairs. In this shared task, we explore the fine-tuning of a pre-trained model motivated by the pre-trained objective of aligning embeddings closer by alignment augmentation (Lin et al.,2020) for 22 scheduled Indian languages. Our primary system is based on language-specific finetuning on a pre-trained model. We achieve chrF2 scores of 50.6, 42.3, 54.9, and 66.3 on the official public test set for eng→as, eng→kha, eng→lus, eng→mni respectively. We also explore multilingual training with/without language grouping and layer-freezing.

This paper describes NLIP Lab’s multilingual machine translation system for the WAT24 shared task on multilingual Indic MT task for 22 scheduled languages belonging to 4 language families. We explore pre-training for Indic languages using alignment agreement objectives. We utilize bi-lingual dictionaries to substitute words from source sentences. Furthermore, we fine-tuned language direction-specific multilingual translation models using small and high-quality seed data. Our primary submission is a 243M parameters multilingual translation model covering 22 Indic languages. In the IN22-Gen benchmark, we achieved an average chrF++ score of 46.80 and 18.19 BLEU score for the En-Indic direction. In the Indic-En direction, we achieved an average chrF++ score of 56.34 and 30.82 BLEU score. In the In22-Conv benchmark, we achieved an average chrF++ score of 43.43 and BLEU score of 16.58 in the En-Indic direction, and in the Indic-En direction, we achieved an average of 52.44 and 29.77 for chrF++ and BLEU respectively. Our model is competitive with IndicTransv1 (474M parameter model).

In this work, we focus on the task of machine translation (MT) from extremely low-resource language (ELRLs) to English. The unavailability of parallel data, lack of representation from large multilingual pre-trained models, and limited monolingual data hinder the development of MT systems for ELRLs. However, many ELRLs often share lexical similarities with high-resource languages (HRLs) due to factors such as dialectical variations, geographical proximity, and language structure. We utilize this property to improve cross-lingual signals from closely related HRL to enable MT for ELRLs. Specifically, we propose a novel unsupervised approach, SelectNoise, based on selective candidate extraction and noise injection to generate noisy HRLs training data. The noise injection acts as a regularizer, and the model trained with noisy data learns to handle lexical variations such as spelling, grammar, and vocabulary changes, leading to improved cross-lingual transfer to ELRLs. The selective candidates are extracted using BPE merge operations and edit operations, and noise injection is performed using greedy, top-p, and top-k sampling strategies. We evaluate the proposed model on 12 ELRLs from the FLORES-200 benchmark in a zero-shot setting across two language families. The proposed model outperformed all the strong baselines, demonstrating its efficacy. It has comparable performance with the supervised noise injection model. Our code and model are publicly available.

Bodo is a scheduled Indian language spoken largely by the Bodo community of Assam and other northeastern Indian states. Due to a lack of resources, it is difficult for young languages to communicate more effectively with the rest of the world. This leads to a lack of research in low-resource languages. The creation of a dataset is a tedious and costly process, particularly for languages with no participatory research. This is more visible for languages that are young and have recently adopted standard writing scripts. In this paper, we present a methodology using Google Keep for OCR to generate a monolingual Bodo corpus from different books. In this work, a Bodo text corpus of 192,327 tokens and 32,268 unique tokens is generated using free, accessible, and daily-usable applications. Moreover, some essential characteristics of the Bodo language are discussed that are neglected by Natural Language Progressing (NLP) researchers.