Machine Translation Advancements of Low-Resource Indian Languages by Transfer Learning

Bin Wei; Jiawei Zhen; Zongyao Li; Zhanglin Wu; Daimeng Wei; Jiaxin Guo; Zhiqiang Rao; Shaojun Li; Yuanchang Luo; Hengchao Shang; Jinlong Yang; Yuhao Xie; Hao Yang

arXiv · 2409.15879

Machine Translation Advancements of Low-Resource Indian Languages by Transfer Learning

Bin Wei·Jiawei Zhen·Zongyao Li·Zhanglin Wu·Daimeng Wei·Jiaxin Guo·Zhiqiang Rao·Shaojun Li·Yuanchang Luo·Hengchao Shang·Jinlong Yang·Yuhao Xie·Hao Yang

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Abstract

This paper introduces the submission by Huawei Translation Center (HW-TSC) to the WMT24 Indian Languages Machine Translation (MT) Shared Task. To develop a reliable machine translation system for low-resource Indian languages, we employed two distinct knowledge transfer strategies, taking into account the characteristics of the language scripts and the support available from existing open-source models for Indian languages. For Assamese(as) and Manipuri(mn), we fine-tuned the existing IndicTrans2 open-source model to enable bidirectional translation between English and these languages. For Khasi (kh) and Mizo (mz), We trained a multilingual model as a baseline using bilingual data from these four language pairs, along with an additional about 8kw English-Bengali bilingual data, all of which share certain linguistic features. This was followed by fine-tuning to achieve bidirectional translation between English and Khasi, as well as English and Mizo. Our transfer learning experiments produced impressive results: 23.5 BLEU for en-as, 31.8 BLEU for en-mn, 36.2 BLEU for as-en, and 47.9 BLEU for mn-en on their respective test sets. Similarly, the multilingual model transfer learning experiments yielded impressive outcomes, achieving 19.7 BLEU for en-kh, 32.8 BLEU for en-mz, 16.1 BLEU for kh-en, and 33.9 BLEU for mz-en on their respective test sets. These results not only highlight the effectiveness of transfer learning techniques for low-resource languages but also contribute to advancing machine translation capabilities for low-resource Indian languages.

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Bin Wei, Jiawei Zhen, Zongyao Li, Zhanglin Wu, Daimeng Wei, Jiaxin Guo, Zhiqiang Rao, Shaojun Li, Yuanchang Luo, Hengchao Shang, Jinlong Yang, Yuhao Xie, Hao Yang. 2024-09-24. Machine Translation Advancements of Low-Resource Indian Languages by Transfer Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15879

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