Neha Gajakos

Author directory

2026

This paper investigates gender behavior in Hindi–English machine translation (MT) within multi-entity settings, especially when two occupational roles appear within the same sentence. Existing benchmarks often focus on single-referenced entities, leaving cross-role dependencies largely unexplored. We define a taxonomy of thirteen role-gender configurations covering masculine (m), feminine (f), and neutral (n) assignments and introduce BRIDGE-MT, a manually created dataset of 351 Hindi–English sentence pairs (594 role-level instances) in order to evaluate dual-role interactions. We evaluated commercial MT systems and multilingual LLMs, and propose neutral-comparison asymmetry metrics and a conditional interaction metric to analyze cross-role dependencies. Our results show that explicitly gendered roles achieve higher F1 scores than neutral-labelled roles. We also observe a consistent position effect, where Role B (the second role) tends to have lower accuracy and greater gender asymmetry than Role A (the first role) across all evaluated systems. Conditional interaction analysis further indicates that the gender assigned to one role can influence the translation of the other. These findings highlight the importance of evaluating gender behavior in multi-entity settings to better understand interaction-driven asymmetries in MT.

2024

This paper presents the SETU-ADAPT’s submissions to the WMT 2024 Low-Resource Indic Language Translation task. We participated in the unconstrained segment of the task, focusing on the Assamese-to-English and English-to-Assamese language pairs. Our approach involves leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as the baseline systems for all our MT tasks. Furthermore, we applied various strategies to improve the baseline systems. In our first approach, we fine-tuned LLMs using all the data provided by the task organisers. Our second approach explores in-context learning by focusing on few-shot prompting. In our final approach we explore an efficient data extraction technique based on a fuzzy match-based similarity measure for fine-tuning. We evaluated our systems using BLEU, chrF, WER, and COMET. The experimental results showed that our strategies can effectively improve the quality of translations in low-resource scenarios.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) research and development has experienced rapid progression in the recent times due to advances in deep learning. The introduction of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) is at the core of this transformation, significantly enhancing the performance of machine translation (MT) and speech technologies. This development has also led to fundamental changes in modern translation and speech tools and their methodologies. However, there remain challenges when extending this progress to underrepresented dialects and low-resource languages, primarily due to the need for more data. This paper details our submissions to the IWSLT speech translation (ST) tasks. We used the Whisper model for the automatic speech recognition (ASR) component. We then used mBART and NLLB as cascaded systems for utilising their MT capabilities. Our research primarily focused on exploring various dialects of low-resource languages and harnessing existing resources from linguistically related languages. We conducted our experiments for two morphologically diverse language pairs: Irish-to-English and Maltese-to-English. We used BLEU, chrF and COMET for evaluating our MT models.