Pushkar Sharma

Author directory

2026

We investigate low-resource Arabic-Asian machine translation across six Arabic-centric translation directions: Arabic↔English, Arabic↔Hindi, and Arabic↔Urdu. Fine-tuned MADLAD-400 ranks first in four of the six directions on the official primary leaderboard and places within the top three in the remaining two. We fine-tune three pretrained multilingual models, MADLAD-400, NLLB-200, and GemmaX2, and compare them with their zero-shot counterparts using BLEU, chrF2++, COMET-22, and TER. Across all language pairs, supervised fine-tuning consistently outperforms zero-shot inference. Among the evaluated models, fine-tuned MADLAD-400 achieves the strongest overall performance, NLLB-200 delivers competitive results, and GemmaX2-28-9B exhibits the largest relative improvement over its zero-shot baseline. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of supervised adaptation for low-resource Arabic-Asian machine translation and highlight MADLAD-400 as the most robust model across the evaluated translation directions.