@inproceedings{tyurin-2026-devlake,
    title = "{D}ev{L}ake at {L}o{R}es{MT} 2026: The Impact of Pre-training and Model Scale on {R}ussian-{B}ashkir Low-Resource Translation",
    author = "Tyurin, Vyacheslav",
    editor = "Ojha, Atul Kr.  and
      Liu, Chao-hong  and
      Vylomova, Ekaterina  and
      Pirinen, Flammie  and
      Washington, Jonathan  and
      Oco, Nathaniel  and
      Zhao, Xiaobing",
    booktitle = "Proceedings for the Ninth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low Resource Languages ({L}o{R}es{MT} 2026)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/manual-author-scripts/2026.loresmt-1.18/",
    pages = "209--212",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-366-1",
    abstract = "This paper describes the submission of Team DevLake for the LoResMT 2026 Shared Task on Russian-Bashkir machine translation. We conducted a comprehensive comparative study of three distinct neural architectures: NLLB-200 (1.3B), M2M-100 (418M), and MarianMT (77M). To overcome hardware constraints, we employed parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques (QLoRA) and extensive data filtering using a domain-specific BERT-based classifier. Our experiments demonstrate that the presence of the target language (Bashkir) in the model{'}s pre-training data is the decisive factor for performance. Our best system, a fine-tuned NLLB-200-1.3B model augmented with exact match retrieval, achieved a CHRF++ score of 52.67. We also report on negative results with custom tokenization for smaller models, providing insights into the limitations of vocabulary adaptation without extensive pre-training."
}