Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in machine translation, but still struggle with unseen low-resource languages, especially those written in underrepresented scripts. To investigate whether LLMs can translate such languages with the help of linguistic resources, we introduce Lotus, a benchmark designed to evaluate translation for Mongolian (in traditional script) and Yi. Our study shows that while linguistic resources can improve translation quality as measured by automatic metrics, LLMs remain limited in their ability to handle these languages effectively. We hope our work provides insights for the low-resource NLP community and fosters further progress in machine translation for underrepresented script low-resource languages. Our code and data are available.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has made remarkable progress in neural machine translation (NMT). However, it exists the problems with uneven sampling distribution, sparse rewards and high variance in training phase. Therefore, we propose a multi-reward reinforcement learning training strategy to decouple action selection and value estimation. Meanwhile, our method combines with language model rewards to jointly optimize model parameters. In addition, we add Gumbel noise in sampling to obtain more effective semantic information. To verify the robustness of our method, we not only conducted experiments on large corpora, but also performed on low-resource languages. Experimental results show that our work is superior to the baselines in WMT14 English-German, LDC2014 Chinese-English and CWMT2018 Mongolian-Chinese tasks, which fully certificates the effectiveness of our method.

For the translation of agglutinative language such as typical Mongolian, unknown (UNK) words not only come from the quite restricted vocabulary, but also mostly from misunderstanding of the translation model to the morphological changes. In this study, we introduce a new adversarial training model to alleviate the UNK problem in Mongolian-Chinese machine translation. The training process can be described as three adversarial sub models (generator, value screener and discriminator), playing a win-win game. In this game, the added screener plays the role of emphasizing that the discriminator pays attention to the added Mongolian morphological noise in the form of pseudo-data and improving the training efficiency. The experimental results show that the newly emerged Mongolian-Chinese task is state-of-the-art. Under this premise, the training time is greatly shortened.

Since 1994, China’s HTRDP machine translation evaluation has been conducted for five times. Systems of various translation directions between Chinese, English, Japanese and French have been tested. Both human evaluation and automatic evaluation are conducted in HTRDP evaluation. In recent years, the evaluation was organized jointly with NICT of Japan. This paper introduces some details of this evaluation.