@inproceedings{chen-abdul-mageed-2021-machine,
    title = "Machine Translation of Low-Resource {I}ndo-{E}uropean Languages",
    author = "Chen, Wei-Rui  and
      Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad",
    editor = "Barrault, Loic  and
      Bojar, Ondrej  and
      Bougares, Fethi  and
      Chatterjee, Rajen  and
      Costa-jussa, Marta R.  and
      Federmann, Christian  and
      Fishel, Mark  and
      Fraser, Alexander  and
      Freitag, Markus  and
      Graham, Yvette  and
      Grundkiewicz, Roman  and
      Guzman, Paco  and
      Haddow, Barry  and
      Huck, Matthias  and
      Yepes, Antonio Jimeno  and
      Koehn, Philipp  and
      Kocmi, Tom  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Morishita, Makoto  and
      Monz, Christof",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2021.wmt-1.41/",
    pages = "347--353",
    abstract = "In this work, we investigate methods for the challenging task of translating between low- resource language pairs that exhibit some level of similarity. In particular, we consider the utility of transfer learning for translating between several Indo-European low-resource languages from the Germanic and Romance language families. In particular, we build two main classes of transfer-based systems to study how relatedness can benefit the translation performance. The primary system fine-tunes a model pre-trained on a related language pair and the contrastive system fine-tunes one pre-trained on an unrelated language pair. Our experiments show that although relatedness is not necessary for transfer learning to work, it does benefit model performance."
}