Very Low Resource Sentence Alignment: Luhya and Swahili

Everlyn Chimoto, Bruce Bassett


Abstract
Language-agnostic sentence embeddings generated by pre-trained models such as LASER and LaBSE are attractive options for mining large datasets to produce parallel corpora for low-resource machine translation. We test LASER and LaBSE in extracting bitext for two related low-resource African languages: Luhya and Swahili. For this work, we created a new parallel set of nearly 8000 Luhya-English sentences which allows a new zero-shot test of LASER and LaBSE. We find that LaBSE significantly outperforms LASER on both languages. Both LASER and LaBSE however perform poorly at zero-shot alignment on Luhya, achieving just 1.5% and 22.0% successful alignments respectively (P@1 score). We fine-tune the embeddings on a small set of parallel Luhya sentences and show significant gains, improving the LaBSE alignment accuracy to 53.3%. Further, restricting the dataset to sentence embedding pairs with cosine similarity above 0.7 yielded alignments with over 85% accuracy.
Anthology ID:
2022.loresmt-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2022)
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Venue:
LoResMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–8
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.loresmt-1.1
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Everlyn Chimoto and Bruce Bassett. 2022. Very Low Resource Sentence Alignment: Luhya and Swahili. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2022), pages 1–8, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Very Low Resource Sentence Alignment: Luhya and Swahili (Chimoto & Bassett, LoResMT 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.loresmt-1.1.pdf
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