@inproceedings{zhou-etal-2023-train,
    title = "Train Global, Tailor Local: Minimalist Multilingual Translation into Endangered Languages",
    author = "Zhou, Zhong  and
      Niehues, Jan  and
      Waibel, Alexander",
    editor = "Ojha, Atul Kr.  and
      Liu, Chao-hong  and
      Vylomova, Ekaterina  and
      Pirinen, Flammie  and
      Abbott, Jade  and
      Washington, Jonathan  and
      Oco, Nathaniel  and
      Malykh, Valentin  and
      Logacheva, Varvara  and
      Zhao, Xiaobing",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the The Sixth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2023)",
    month = may,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Dubrovnik, Croatia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.loresmt-1.1",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.loresmt-1.1",
    pages = "1--15",
    abstract = "In many humanitarian scenarios, translation into severely low resource languages often does not require a universal translation engine, but a dedicated text-specific translation engine. For example, healthcare records, hygienic procedures, government communication, emergency procedures and religious texts are all limited texts. While generic translation engines for all languages do not exist, translation of multilingually known limited texts into new, endangered languages may be possible and reduce human translation effort. We attempt to leverage translation resources from rich resource languages to efficiently produce best possible translation quality for well known texts, which is available in multiple languages, in a new, severely low resource language. We examine two approaches: 1.) best selection of seed sentences to jump start translations in a new language in view of best generalization to the remainder of a larger targeted text(s), and 2.) we adapt large general multilingual translation engines from many other languages to focus on a specific text in a new, unknown language. We find that adapting large pretrained multilingual models to the domain/text first and then to the severely low resource language works best. If we also select a best set of seed sentences, we can improve average chrF performance on new test languages from a baseline of 21.9 to 50.7, while reducing the number of seed sentences to only ∼1,000 in the new, unknown language.",
}