@inproceedings{suen-etal-2024-leveraging,
    title = "Leveraging {M}andarin as a Pivot Language for Low-Resource Machine Translation between {C}antonese and {E}nglish",
    author = "Suen, King Yiu  and
      Chow, Rudolf  and
      Lam, Albert Y.S.",
    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 Seventh Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2024)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2024.loresmt-1.8/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.loresmt-1.8",
    pages = "74--84",
    abstract = "Cantonese, the second most prevalent Chinese dialect after Mandarin, has been relatively overlooked in machine translation (MT) due to a scarcity of bilingual resources. In this paper, we propose to leverage Mandarin, a high-resource language, as a pivot language for translating between Cantonese and English. Our method utilizes transfer learning from pre-trained Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformer (BART) models to initialize auxiliary source-pivot and pivot-target MT models. The parameters of the trained auxiliary models are then used to initialize the source-target model. Based on our experiments, our proposed method outperforms several baseline initialization strategies, naive pivot translation, and two commercial translation systems in both translation directions."
}