Other Journal Details
Mandatory Fields
Passban, P;Liu, Q;Way, A
2017
September
ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing
Translating Low-Resource Languages by Vocabulary Adaptation from Close Counterparts
Published
Optional Fields
Statistical machine translation, neural machine translation, low resource languages
16
4
Some natural languages belong to the same family or share similar syntactic and/or semantic regularities. This property persuades researchers to share computational models across languages and benefit from high-quality models to boost existing low-performance counterparts. In this article, we follow a similar idea, whereby we develop statistical and neural machine translation (MT) engines that are trained on one language pair but are used to translate another language. First we train a reliable model for a high-resource language, and then we exploit cross-lingual similarities and adapt the model to work for a close language with almost zero resources. We chose Turkish (Tr) and Azeri or Azerbaijani (Az) as the proposed pair in our experiments. Azeri suffers from lack of resources as there is almost no bilingual corpus for this language. Via our techniques, we are able to train an engine for the Az. English (En) direction, which is able to outperform all other existing models.
NEW YORK
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY
2375-4699
10.1145/3099556
Grant Details