Martin Bär


2024

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Robustness of Fine-Tuned Models for Machine Translation with Varying Noise Levels: Insights for Asturian, Aragonese and Aranese
Martin Bär | Elisa Forcada Rodríguez | María García-Abadillo Velasco
Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation

We present the LCT-LAP proposal for the shared task on Translation into Low-Resource Languages of Spain at WMT24 within the constrained submission category. Our work harnesses encoder-decoder models pretrained on higher-resource Iberian languages to facilitate MT model training for Asturian, Aranese and Aragonese. Furthermore, we explore the robustness of these models when fine-tuned on datasets with varying levels of alignment noise. We fine-tuned a Spanish-Galician model using Asturian data filtered by BLEU score thresholds of 5, 15, 30 and 60, identifying BLEU 15 as the most effective. This threshold was then applied to the Aranese and Aragonese datasets. Our findings indicate that filtering the corpora reduces computational costs and improves performance compared to using nearly raw data or data filtered with language identification. However, it still falls short of the performance achieved by the rule-based system Apertium in Aranese and Aragonese.

2023

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UM-DFKI Maltese Speech Translation
Aiden Williams | Kurt Abela | Rishu Kumar | Martin Bär | Hannah Billinghurst | Kurt Micallef | Ahnaf Mozib Samin | Andrea DeMarco | Lonneke van der Plas | Claudia Borg
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2023)

For the 2023 IWSLT Maltese Speech Translation Task, UM-DFKI jointly presents a cascade solution which achieves 0.6 BLEU. While this is the first time that a Maltese speech translation task has been released by IWSLT, this paper explores previous solutions for other speech translation tasks, focusing primarily on low-resource scenarios. Moreover, we present our method of fine-tuning XLS-R models for Maltese ASR using a collection of multi-lingual speech corpora as well as the fine-tuning of the mBART model for Maltese to English machine translation.