A large number of significant assets are available online in English, which is frequently translated into native languages to ease the information sharing among local people who are not much familiar with English. However, manual translation is a very tedious, costly, and time-taking process. To this end, machine translation is an effective approach to convert text to a different language without any human involvement. Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the most proficient translation techniques amongst all existing machine translation systems. In this paper, we have applied NMT on two of the most morphological rich Indian languages, i.e. English-Tamil and English-Malayalam. We proposed a novel NMT model using Multihead self-attention along with pre-trained Byte-Pair-Encoded (BPE) and MultiBPE embeddings to develop an efficient translation system that overcomes the OOV (Out Of Vocabulary) problem for low resourced morphological rich Indian languages which do not have much translation available online. We also collected corpus from different sources, addressed the issues with these publicly available data and refined them for further uses. We used the BLEU score for evaluating our system performance. Experimental results and survey confirmed that our proposed translator (24.34 and 9.78 BLEU score) outperforms Google translator (9.40 and 5.94 BLEU score) respectively.
Indian Institute of Information Technology Tiruchirappalli（印度特里奇拉帕利信息技术学院）；ULTRA Arts and Science College（ULTRA文理学院）；Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering（斯里·西瓦苏布拉马尼亚·纳达尔工程学院）；Kongu Engineering College（孔古工程学院）；Sultan Idris Education University（苏丹依德里斯教育大学）；National University of Ireland Galway（爱尔兰国立大学戈尔韦分校）
This paper reports the Machine Translation (MT) systems submitted by the IIITT team for the English->Marathi and English->Irish language pairs LoResMT 2021 shared task. The task focuses on getting exceptional translations for rather low-resourced languages like Irish and Marathi. We fine-tune IndicTrans, a pretrained multilingual NMT model for English->Marathi, using external parallel corpus as input for additional training. We have used a pretrained Helsinki-NLP Opus MT English->Irish model for the latter language pair. Our approaches yield relatively promising results on the BLEU metrics. Un…
English to Indian language machine translation poses the challenge of structural and morphological divergence. This paper describes English to Indian language statistical machine translation using pre-ordering and suffix separation. The pre-ordering uses rules to transfer the structure of the source sentences prior to training and translation. This syntactic restructuring helps statistical machine translation to tackle the structural divergence and hence better translation quality. The suffix separation is used to tackle the morphological divergence between English and highly agglutinative Ind…
We present a simple, yet effective, Neural Machine Translation system for Indian languages. We demonstrate the feasibility for multiple language pairs, and establish a strong baseline for further research.
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Carnegie Mellon University Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学卡塔尔分校）
We present the second ever evaluated Arabic dialect-to-dialect machine translation effort, and the first to leverage external resources beyond a small parallel corpus. The subject has not previously received serious attention due to lack of naturally occurring parallel data; yet its importance is evidenced by dialectal Arabic's wide usage and breadth of inter-dialect variation, comparable to that of Romance languages. Our results suggest that modeling morphology and syntax significantly improves dialect-to-dialect translation, though optimizing such data-sparse models requires consideration of…
In this paper we present our work on a case study between Statistical Machien Transaltion (SMT) and Rule-Based Machine Translation (RBMT) systems on English-Indian langugae and Indian to Indian langugae perspective. Main objective of our study is to make a five way performance compariosn; such as, a) SMT and RBMT b) SMT on English-Indian langugae c) RBMT on English-Indian langugae d) SMT on Indian to Indian langugae perspective e) RBMT on Indian to Indian langugae perspective. Through a detailed analysis we describe the Rule Based and the Statistical Machine Translation system developments and…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Data Science Institute, National University of Ireland Galway（爱尔兰国立高威大学数据科学研究所（Insight数据分析中心））；United Language Group（联合语言集团）
Rule-based machine translation is a machine translation paradigm where linguistic knowledge is encoded by an expert in the form of rules that translate text from source to target language. While this approach grants extensive control over the output of the system, the cost of formalising the needed linguistic knowledge is much higher than training a corpus-based system, where a machine learning approach is used to automatically learn to translate from examples. In this paper, we describe different approaches to leverage the information contained in rule-based machine translation systems to imp…
This paper discusses Centre for Development of Advanced Computing Mumbai's (CDACM) submission to the NLP Tools Contest on Statistical Machine Translation in Indian Languages (ILSMT) 2014 (collocated with ICON 2014). The objective of the contest was to explore the effectiveness of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) for Indian language to Indian language and English-Hindi machine translation. In this paper, we have proposed that suffix separation and word splitting for SMT from agglutinative languages to Hindi significantly improves over the baseline (BL). We have also shown that the factored…
This paper presents Centre for Development of Advanced Computing Mumbai's (CDACM) submission to NLP Tools Contest on Statistical Machine Translation in Indian Languages (ILSMT) 2015 (collocated with ICON 2015). The aim of the contest was to collectively explore the effectiveness of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) while translating within Indian languages and between English and Indian languages. In this paper, we report our work on all five language pairs, namely Bengali-Hindi (\bnhi), Marathi-Hindi (\mrhi), Tamil-Hindi (\tahi), Telugu-Hindi (\tehi), and English-Hindi (\enhi) for Health,…
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
Being less resource languages, Indian-Indian and English-Indian language MT system developments faces the difficulty to translate various lexical phenomena. In this paper, we present our work on a comparative study of 440 phrase-based statistical trained models for 110 language pairs across 11 Indian languages. We have developed 110 baseline Statistical Machine Translation systems. Then we have augmented the training corpus with Indowordnet synset word entries of lexical database and further trained 110 models on top of the baseline system. We have done a detailed performance comparison using …
COMSAT University（COMSATS大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
In this study, we present an analysis regarding the performance of the state-of-art Phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) on multiple Indian languages. We report baseline systems on several language pairs. The motivation of this study is to promote the development of SMT and linguistic resources for these language pairs, as the current state-of-the-art is quite bleak due to sparse data resources. The success of an SMT system is contingent on the availability of a large parallel corpus. Such data is necessary to reliably estimate translation probabilities. We report the performance…
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Barcelona Supercomputing Center（巴塞罗那超级计算中心）
This paper describes the system developed at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya for the Workshop on Machine Translation 2022 Sign Language Translation Task, in particular, for the sign-to-text direction. We use a Transformer model implemented with the Fairseq modeling toolkit. We have experimented with the vocabulary size, data augmentation techniques and pretraining the model with the PHOENIX-14T dataset. Our system obtains 0.50 BLEU score for the test set, improving the organizers' baseline by 0.38 BLEU. We remark the poor results for both the baseline and our system, and thus, the unr…
Jacobs University Bremen（雅各布大学不来梅）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Building effective neural machine translation (NMT) models for very low-resourced and morphologically rich African indigenous languages is an open challenge. Besides the issue of finding available resources for them, a lot of work is put into preprocessing and tokenization. Recent studies have shown that standard tokenization methods do not always adequately deal with the grammatical, diacritical, and tonal properties of some African languages. That, coupled with the extremely low availability of training samples, hinders the production of reliable NMT models. In this paper, using Fon language…
In todays digital world automated Machine Translation of one language to another has covered a long way to achieve different kinds of success stories. Whereas Babel Fish supports a good number of foreign languages and only Hindi from Indian languages, the Google Translator takes care of about 10 Indian languages. Though most of the Automated Machine Translation Systems are doing well but handling Indian languages needs a major care while handling the local proverbs/ idioms. Most of the Machine Translation system follows the direct translation approach while translating one Indian language to o…
Transformer based language models have led to impressive results across all domains in Natural Language Processing. Pretraining these models on language modeling tasks and finetuning them on downstream tasks such as Text Classification, Question Answering and Neural Machine Translation has consistently shown exemplary results. In this work, we propose a Multitask Finetuning methodology which combines the Bilingual Machine Translation task with an auxiliary Causal Language Modeling task to improve performance on the former task on Indian Languages. We conduct an empirical study on three languag…
Microsoft India（微软印度）；Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
In this work, we present an extensive study of statistical machine translation involving languages of the Indian subcontinent. These languages are related by genetic and contact relationships. We describe the similarities between Indic languages arising from these relationships. We explore how lexical and orthographic similarity among these languages can be utilized to improve translation quality between Indic languages when limited parallel corpora is available. We also explore how the structural correspondence between Indic languages can be utilized to re-use linguistic resources for English…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）；Data Science Institute（数据科学研究所）；National University of Ireland Galway（爱尔兰国立高威大学）
Machine translation is one of the applications of natural language processing which has been explored in different languages. Recently researchers started paying attention towards machine translation for resource-poor languages and closely related languages. A widespread and underlying problem for these machine translation systems is the variation in orthographic conventions which causes many issues to traditional approaches. Two languages written in two different orthographies are not easily comparable, but orthographic information can also be used to improve the machine translation system. T…
IIIT Hyderabad（国际信息技术研究所海得拉巴分校）；University of Bath（巴斯大学）
Indian language machine translation performance is hampered due to the lack of large scale multi-lingual sentence aligned corpora and robust benchmarks. Through this paper, we provide and analyse an automated framework to obtain such a corpus for Indian language neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Our pipeline consists of a baseline NMT system, a retrieval module, and an alignment module that is used to work with publicly available websites such as press releases by the government. The main contribution towards this effort is to obtain an incremental method that uses the above pipeline t…
In this paper, we address the task of improving pair-wise machine translation for specific low resource Indian languages. Multilingual NMT models have demonstrated a reasonable amount of effectiveness on resource-poor languages. In this work, we show that the performance of these models can be significantly improved upon by using back-translation through a filtered back-translation process and subsequent fine-tuning on the limited pair-wise language corpora. The analysis in this paper suggests that this method can significantly improve a multilingual model's performance over its baseline, yiel…
Chhotubhai Gopalbhai Patel Institute of Technology, Uka Tarsadia University（乌卡·塔萨迪亚大学乔图巴伊·戈帕尔巴伊·帕特尔理工学院）；Babumadhav Institute of Information Technology, Uka Tarsadia University（乌卡·塔萨迪亚大学巴布马德哈夫信息技术学院）
Deep Learning techniques are powerful in mimicking humans in a particular set of problems. They have achieved a remarkable performance in complex learning tasks. Deep learning inspired Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is a proficient technique that outperforms traditional machine translation. Performing machine-aided translation on Indic languages has always been a challenging task considering their rich and diverse grammar. The neural machine translation has shown quality results compared to the traditional machine translation approaches. The fully automatic machine translation becomes proble…
Revisiting Metric Reliability for Fine-grained Evaluation of Machine Translation and Summarization in Indian Languages
Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工学院）；Vellore Institute of Technology（韦洛雷理工学院）；IIT Kharagpur（印度理工学院达卡分校）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
University of Information and Communication Technology TNU（太原大学信息与通信技术大学）；University of Engineering and Technology VNU（越南国家大学工程技术大学）；Institute of Anthropomatics and Robotics KIT（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院人类与机器人研究所）；School of Information Science JAIST（北陆先端科学技术大学院大学信息科学学院）
Neural machine translation (NMT) systems have recently obtained state-of-the art in many machine translation systems between popular language pairs because of the availability of data. For low-resourced language pairs, there are few researches in this field due to the lack of bilingual data. In this paper, we attempt to build the first NMT systems for a low-resourced language pairs:Japanese-Vietnamese. We have also shown significant improvements when combining advanced methods to reduce the adverse impacts of data sparsity and improve the quality of NMT systems. In addition, we proposed a vari…
This paper examines the problem of adapting neural machine translation systems to new, low-resourced languages (LRLs) as effectively and rapidly as possible. We propose methods based on starting with massively multilingual "seed models", which can be trained ahead-of-time, and then continuing training on data related to the LRL. We contrast a number of strategies, leading to a novel, simple, yet effective method of "similar-language regularization", where we jointly train on both a LRL of interest and a similar high-resourced language to prevent over-fitting to small LRL data. Experiments demo…
Developing parallel corpora is an important and a difficult activity for Machine Translation. This requires manual annotation by Human Translators. Translating same text again is a useless activity. There are tools available to implement this for European Languages, but no such tool is available for Indian Languages. In this paper we present a tool for Indian Languages which not only provides automatic translations of the previously available translation but also provides multiple translations, in cases where a sentence has multiple translations, in ranked list of suggestive translations for a…
Masakhane；University of Pretoria（比勒陀利亚大学）；Niger-Volta LTI；African Masters in Machine Intelligence（非洲机器智能硕士项目）；Federal University of Technology, Akure（阿库雷联邦理工大学）；University of Johannesburg（约翰内斯堡大学）；Bayero University, Kano（卡诺贝罗大学）；Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology（乔莫·肯雅塔农业技术大学）；UESTC（电子科技大学）；Siseng Consulting Ltd（Siseng咨询有限公司）；African Leadership University（非洲领导力大学）；InstaDeep Ltd（InstaDeep有限公司）；Sapienza University of Rome（罗马第一大学）；Udacity（优达城）；Parliament, Republic of South Africa（南非共和国议会）；Explore Data Science Academy（Explore数据科学学院）；UCD, Konta；AI4D
Research in NLP lacks geographic diversity, and the question of how NLP can be scaled to low-resourced languages has not yet been adequately solved. "Low-resourced"-ness is a complex problem going beyond data availability and reflects systemic problems in society. In this paper, we focus on the task of Machine Translation (MT), that plays a crucial role for information accessibility and communication worldwide. Despite immense improvements in MT over the past decade, MT is centered around a few high-resourced languages. As MT researchers cannot solve the problem of low-resourcedness alone, we …
In this paper, we proposed two strategies which can be applied to a multilingual neural machine translation system in order to better tackle zero-shot scenarios despite not having any parallel corpus. The experiments show that they are effective in terms of both performance and computing resources, especially in multilingual translation of unbalanced data in real zero-resourced condition when they alleviate the language bias problem.
Language is an essential factor of emancipation. Unfortunately, most of the more than 2,000 African languages are low-resourced. The community has recently used machine translation to revive and strengthen several African languages. However, the trained models are often bilingual, resulting in a potentially exponential number of models to train and maintain to cover all possible translation directions. Additionally, bilingual models do not leverage the similarity between some of the languages. Consequently, multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) is gaining considerable interest, especia…
Given that South African education is in crisis, strategies for improvement and sustainability of high-quality, up-to-date education must be explored. In the migration of education online, inclusion of machine translation for low-resourced local languages becomes necessary. This paper aims to spur the use of current neural machine translation (NMT) techniques for low-resourced local languages. The paper demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on English-to-Setswana translation using the Autshumato dataset. The use of the Transformer architecture beat previous techniques by 5.33 BLEU points. …
IndicTrans2: Towards High-Quality and Accessible Machine Translation Models for all 22 Scheduled Indian Languages
Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat（AI4Bharat 尼勒卡尼中心）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（马德拉斯印度理工学院）；Microsoft（微软）；National Institute of Information and Communications Technology（信息通信研究机构）；Flipkart（弗利普卡特）
Although researchers and practitioners are pushing the boundaries and enhancing the capacities of NLP tools and methods, works on African languages are lagging. A lot of focus on well resourced languages such as English, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Mandarin Chinese etc. Over 97% of the world's 7000 languages, including African languages, are low resourced for NLP i.e. they have little or no data, tools, and techniques for NLP research. For instance, only 5 out of 2965, 0.19% authors of full text papers in the ACL Anthology extracted from the 5 major conferences in 2018 ACL, NAACL, EMNLP…
TALP Research Center（TALP研究中心）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）
Common intermediate language representation in neural machine translation can be used to extend bilingual to multilingual systems by incremental training. In this paper, we propose a new architecture based on introducing an interlingual loss as an additional training objective. By adding and forcing this interlingual loss, we are able to train multiple encoders and decoders for each language, sharing a common intermediate representation. Translation results on the low-resourced tasks (Turkish-English and Kazakh-English tasks, from the popular Workshop on Machine Translation benchmark) show the…
Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）；MMT Srl（MMT有限公司）
In recent years, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been shown to be more effective than phrase-based statistical methods, thus quickly becoming the state of the art in machine translation (MT). However, NMT systems are limited in translating low-resourced languages, due to the significant amount of parallel data that is required to learn useful mappings between languages. In this work, we show how the so-called multilingual NMT can help to tackle the challenges associated with low-resourced language translation. The underlying principle of multilingual NMT is to force the creation of hidden…
One of the basic tasks of computational language documentation (CLD) is to identify word boundaries in an unsegmented phonemic stream. While several unsupervised monolingual word segmentation algorithms exist in the literature, they are challenged in real-world CLD settings by the small amount of available data. A possible remedy is to take advantage of glosses or translation in a foreign, well-resourced, language, which often exist for such data. In this paper, we explore and compare ways to exploit neural machine translation models to perform unsupervised boundary detection with bilingual in…
There have been very few attempts to benchmark performances of state-of-the-art algorithms for Neural Machine Translation task on Indian Languages. Google, Bing, Facebook and Yandex are some of the very few companies which have built translation systems for few of the Indian Languages. Among them, translation results from Google are supposed to be better, based on general inspection. Bing-Translator do not even support Marathi language which has around 95 million speakers and ranks 15th in the world in terms of combined primary and secondary speakers. In this exercise, we trained and compared …
In this paper, we present our first attempts in building a multilingual Neural Machine Translation framework under a unified approach. We are then able to employ attention-based NMT for many-to-many multilingual translation tasks. Our approach does not require any special treatment on the network architecture and it allows us to learn minimal number of free parameters in a standard way of training. Our approach has shown its effectiveness in an under-resourced translation scenario with considerable improvements up to 2.6 BLEU points. In addition, the approach has achieved interesting and promi…
Syntactic parsing is a necessary task which is required for NLP applications including machine translation. It is a challenging task to develop a qualitative parser for morphological rich and agglutinative languages. Syntactic analysis is used to understand the grammatical structure of a natural language sentence. It outputs all the grammatical information of each word and its constituent. Also issues related to it help us to understand the language in a more detailed way. This literature survey is groundwork to understand the different parser development for Indian languages and various appro…
CorIL: Towards Enriching Indian Language to Indian Language Parallel Corpora and Machine Translation Systems
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna（计算机科学与工程系，印度理工学院帕纳布）；SNLP Lab, CDAC Noida（SNLP实验室，CDAC诺伊达）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology（计算机科学与工程系，曼尼普尔理工学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Dhirubhai Ambani University, Gandhinagar（计算机科学与工程系，迪鲁布希阿米大学，甘地 Nagar）；LTRC, IIIT Hyderabad（LTRC，IIIT海得拉尔）；Department of CSE, IIIT Bhubaneshwar（CSE系，IIIT布巴内什瓦尔）；Department of AI, SVNIT, Surat（人工智能系，SVNIT，萨拉特）；Department of Linguistics, University of Kashmir（语言学系，克什米尔大学）；VLSI Design Group, CDAC Bangalore（VLSI设计组，CDAC班加罗尔）；Department of CSE, Punjabi University（CSE系，旁遮普大学）；Department of CSE, Govt. College for Women Jammu（CSE系，贾姆穆政府女子学院）
International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad（国际信息技术研究所海得拉巴分校）；Indian Institute of Technology - Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）
We present sentence aligned parallel corpora across 10 Indian Languages - Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Urdu, Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Punjabi, and English - many of which are categorized as low resource. The corpora are compiled from online sources which have content shared across languages. The corpora presented significantly extends present resources that are either not large enough or are restricted to a specific domain (such as health). We also provide a separate test corpus compiled from an independent online source that can be independently used for validating the performan…
University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Facebook AI（脸书人工智能）
Recent work in multilingual machine translation (MMT) has focused on the potential of positive transfer between languages, particularly cases where higher-resourced languages can benefit lower-resourced ones. While training an MMT model, the supervision signals learned from one language pair can be transferred to the other via the tokens shared by multiple source languages. However, the transfer is inhibited when the token overlap among source languages is small, which manifests naturally when languages use different writing systems. In this paper, we tackle inhibited transfer by augmenting th…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics（洞察数据 analytics 中心）；National University of Ireland Galway（爱尔兰国立高威大学）
Machine translation is the task of translating texts from one language to another using computers. It has been one of the major tasks in natural language processing and computational linguistics and has been motivating to facilitate human communication. Kurdish, an Indo-European language, has received little attention in this realm due to the language being less-resourced. Therefore, in this paper, we are addressing the main issues in creating a machine translation system for the Kurdish language, with a focus on the Sorani dialect. We describe the available scarce parallel data suitable for t…
Out of vocabulary (OOV) is a problem in the context of Machine Translation (MT) in low-resourced languages. When source and/or target languages are morphologically rich, it becomes even worse. Bilingual list integration is an approach to address the OOV problem. This allows more words to be translated than are in the training data. However, since bilingual lists contain words in the base form, it will not translate inflected forms for morphologically rich languages such as Sinhala and Tamil. This paper focuses on data augmentation techniques where bilingual lexicon terms are expanded based on …
Jawaharlal Nehru University（贾瓦哈拉尔·尼赫鲁大学）；ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学ADAPT中心）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
This paper presents the system description of Machine Translation (MT) system(s) for Indic Languages Multilingual Task for the 2018 edition of the WAT Shared Task. In our experiments, we (the RGNLP team) explore both statistical and neural methods across all language pairs. (We further present an extensive comparison of language-related problems for both the approaches in the context of low-resourced settings.) Our PBSMT models were highest score on all automatic evaluation metrics in the English into Telugu, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil portion of the shared task.
Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）；University of the Basque Country（巴斯克大学）
In this paper we present the ADAPT system built for the Basque to English Low Resource MT Evaluation Campaign. Basque is a low-resourced, morphologically-rich language. This poses a challenge for Neural Machine Translation models which usually achieve better performance when trained with large sets of data. Accordingly, we used synthetic data to improve the translation quality produced by a model built using only authentic data. Our proposal uses back-translated data to: (a) create new sentences, so the system can be trained with more data; and (b) translate sentences that are close to the tes…
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）；IITB-Monash Research Academy（印度理工学院孟买分校-莫纳什大学联合研究院）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
Cognates are present in multiple variants of the same text across different languages (e.g., "hund" in German and "hound" in English language mean "dog"). They pose a challenge to various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as Machine Translation, Cross-lingual Sense Disambiguation, Computational Phylogenetics, and Information Retrieval. A possible solution to address this challenge is to identify cognates across language pairs. In this paper, we describe the creation of two cognate datasets for twelve Indian languages, namely Sanskrit, Hindi, Assamese, Oriya, Kannada, Gujarati…
