Nick Thieberger

Author directory

2026

For our submission to the WMT26 Creole Language Translation Shared Task, we focus on MT models for Pacific creoles: Tok Pisin, Bislama, and Solomon Pijin, with particular attention to broad domain performance. After pre-training on a large mix of domain-imbalanced data, we continue fine-tuning on a diverse mix of domain-balanced data. We rely on a number of data collection and preparation techniques, including LLM-assisted respelling and alignment, back-translation, and distillation from Gemini for domains originally not present in training data. Evaluated on Bouquet and a novel test set made of spoken transcripts, our models beat open model baselines by 3+ chrF++ points in all directions with human-original references. Looking ahead, we plan to develop human-translated test sets for Solomon Pijin and Bislama, and to distil our best models into much smaller ones that retain broad domain coverage.

2025

Expanding the breadth languages used to study sociophonetic variation and change is an important step in the theoretical development of sociophonetics. As data archives grow, forced alignment can accelerate the study of sociophonetic variation in minority languages. This paper examines the application of English and custom-made acoustic models on the alignment of vowels in two Pacific Creoles, Tok Pisin (59 hours) and Bislama (38.5 hours). We find that English models perform acceptably well in both languages, and as well as humans in vowel environments described as ‘Highly Reliable’. Custom models performed better in Bislama than Tok Pisin. We end the paper with recommendations on the use of cross-linguistic acoustic models in the case of English-Based Creoles.
Machine translation (MT) systems that support low-resource languages often struggle on specialized domains. While researchers have proposed various techniques for domain adaptation, these approaches typically require model fine-tuning, making them impractical for non-technical users and small organizations. To address this gap, we propose Tulun, a versatile solution for terminology-aware translation, combining neural MT with large language model (LLM)-based post-editing guided by existing glossaries and translation memories.Our open-source web-based platform enables users to easily create, edit, and leverage terminology resources, fostering a collaborative human-machine translation process that respects and incorporates domain expertise while increasing MT accuracy.Evaluations show effectiveness in both real-world and benchmark scenarios: on medical and disaster relief translation tasks for Tetun and Bislama, our system achieves improvements of 16.90-22.41 ChrF++ points over baseline MT systems. Across six low-resource languages on the FLORES dataset, Tulun outperforms both standalone MT and LLM approaches, achieving an average improvement of 2.8 ChrF++ points over NLLB-54B. Tulun is publicly accessible at https://bislama-trans.rapha.dev.

2021

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2007