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arXiv · 2201.13072

Are Mutually Intelligible Languages Easier to Translate?

Avital Friedland·Jonathan Zeltser·Omer Levy
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Abstract

Two languages are considered mutually intelligible if their native speakers can communicate with each other, while using their own mother tongue. How does the fact that humans perceive a language pair as mutually intelligible affect the ability to learn a translation model between them? We hypothesize that the amount of data needed to train a neural ma-chine translation model is anti-proportional to the languages' mutual intelligibility. Experiments on the Romance language group reveal that there is indeed strong correlation between the area under a model's learning curve and mutual intelligibility scores obtained by studying human speakers.

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Avital Friedland, Jonathan Zeltser, Omer Levy. 2022-01-31. Are Mutually Intelligible Languages Easier to Translate?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.13072

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