Take Shelter, Zanmi: Digitally Alerting Cyclone Victims in Their Languages

Nathaniel Romney Robinson


Abstract
Natural disasters such as tropical cyclones cause annual devastation and take a heavy so- cial cost, as disadvantaged communities are typ- ically hit hardest. Among these communities are the speakers of minority and low-resource languages, who may not be sufficiently in- formed about incoming weather events to pre- pare. This work presents an analysis of the current state of machine translation for natural disasters in the languages of communities that are threatened by them. Results suggest that commercial systems are promising, and that in-genre fine-tuning data are beneficial.
Anthology ID:
2025.nlp4pi-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Katherine Atwell, Laura Biester, Angana Borah, Daryna Dementieva, Oana Ignat, Neema Kotonya, Ziyi Liu, Ruyuan Wan, Steven Wilson, Jieyu Zhao
Venues:
NLP4PI | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
70–76
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.nlp4pi-1.6/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.nlp4pi-1.6
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nathaniel Romney Robinson. 2025. Take Shelter, Zanmi: Digitally Alerting Cyclone Victims in Their Languages. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI), pages 70–76, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Take Shelter, Zanmi: Digitally Alerting Cyclone Victims in Their Languages (Robinson, NLP4PI 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.nlp4pi-1.6.pdf