@inproceedings{mamasaidov-etal-2025-filling,
    title = "Filling the Gap for {U}zbek: Creating Translation Resources for {S}outhern {U}zbek",
    author = "Mamasaidov, Mukhammadsaid  and
      Aral, Azizullah  and
      Shopulatov, Abror  and
      Inomjonov, Mironshoh",
    editor = "Haddow, Barry  and
      Kocmi, Tom  and
      Koehn, Philipp  and
      Monz, Christof",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.wmt-1.83/",
    pages = "1081--1087",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-341-8",
    abstract = "Southern Uzbek (uzs) is a Turkic language variety spoken by around 5 million people in Afghanistan and differs significantly from Northern Uzbek (uzn) in phonology, lexicon, and orthography. Despite the large number of speakers, Southern Uzbek is underrepresented in natural language processing. We present new resources for Southern Uzbek machine translation, including a 997-sentence FLORES+ dev set, 39,994 parallel sentences from dictionary, literary, and web sources, and a fine-tuned NLLB-200 model (lutfiy). We also propose a post-processing method for restoring Arabic-script half-space characters, which improves handling of morphological boundaries. All datasets, models, and tools are released publicly to support future work on Southern Uzbek and other low-resource languages."
}