@inproceedings{novokshanov-etal-2026-shughni,
    title = "{S}hughni Machine Translation Enhanced by Donor Languages",
    author = "Novokshanov, Dmitry  and
      Humonen, Innokentiy S.  and
      Makarov, Ilya",
    editor = "Merchant, Rayyan  and
      Megerdoomian, Karine",
    booktitle = "The Proceedings of the First Workshop on {NLP} and {LLM}s for the {I}ranian Language Family",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/manual-author-scripts/2026.silkroadnlp-1.12/",
    pages = "114--120",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-371-5",
    abstract = "This paper presents the first machine translation system for Shughni, an extremely lowresource Eastern Iranian language spoken in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. We fine-tune NLLB-200 models and explore auxiliary language selection through typological similarity and ``super-donor'' experiments. Our final Shughni{--}Russian model achieves a chrF++ score of 36.3 (45.7 on BivalTyp data), establishing the first computational translation resource for this language. Beyond reporting system performance, this work demonstrates a practical path toward supporting languages with virtually no prior MT resources. Our demo system with Shughni-Russian- English translation (Russian serves as a pivot language for the Shughni- English pair) is available on Hugging- Face (https://huggingface.co/spaces/Novokshanov/Shughni-Translator)."
}