@inproceedings{murthy-etal-2019-addressing,
    title = "Addressing word-order Divergence in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation for extremely Low Resource Languages",
    author = "Murthy, Rudra  and
      Kunchukuttan, Anoop  and
      Bhattacharyya, Pushpak",
    editor = "Burstein, Jill  and
      Doran, Christy  and
      Solorio, Thamar",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North {A}merican Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)",
    month = jun,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Minneapolis, Minnesota",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/N19-1387/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/N19-1387",
    pages = "3868--3873",
    abstract = "Transfer learning approaches for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) train a NMT model on an assisting language-target language pair (parent model) which is later fine-tuned for the source language-target language pair of interest (child model), with the target language being the same. In many cases, the assisting language has a different word order from the source language. We show that divergent word order adversely limits the benefits from transfer learning when little to no parallel corpus between the source and target language is available. To bridge this divergence, we propose to pre-order the assisting language sentences to match the word order of the source language and train the parent model. Our experiments on many language pairs show that bridging the word order gap leads to significant improvement in the translation quality in extremely low-resource scenarios."
}