Despite the recent advancements of attention-based deep learning architectures across a majority of Natural Language Processing tasks, their application remains limited in a low-resource setting because of a lack of pre-trained models for such languages. In this study, we make the first attempt to investigate the challenges of adapting these techniques to an extremely low-resource language – Sumerian cuneiform – one of the world’s oldest written languages attested from at least the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. Specifically, we introduce the first cross-lingual information extraction pipeline for Sumerian, which includes part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and machine translation. We introduce InterpretLR, an interpretability toolkit for low-resource NLP and use it alongside human evaluations to gauge the trained models. Notably, all our techniques and most components of our pipeline can be generalised to any low-resource language. We publicly release all our implementations including a novel data set with domain-specific pre-processing to promote further research in this domain.

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.

A huge amount of valuable resources is available on the web in English, which are often translated into local languages to facilitate knowledge sharing among local people who are not much familiar with English. However, translating such content manually is very tedious, costly, and time-consuming process. To this end, machine translation is an efficient approach to translate text without any human involvement. Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the most recent and effective translation technique amongst all existing machine translation systems. In this paper, we apply NMT for English-Tamil language pair. We propose a novel neural machine translation technique using word-embedding along with Byte-Pair-Encoding (BPE) to develop an efficient translation system that overcomes the OOV (Out Of Vocabulary) problem for languages which do not have much translations available online. We use the BLEU score for evaluating the system performance. Experimental results confirm that our proposed MIDAS translator (8.33 BLEU score) outperforms Google translator (3.75 BLEU score).