Christian Roest


2020

pdf
Machine Translation for English–Inuktitut with Segmentation, Data Acquisition and Pre-Training
Christian Roest | Lukas Edman | Gosse Minnema | Kevin Kelly | Jennifer Spenader | Antonio Toral
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

Translating to and from low-resource polysynthetic languages present numerous challenges for NMT. We present the results of our systems for the English–Inuktitut language pair for the WMT 2020 translation tasks. We investigated the importance of correct morphological segmentation, whether or not adding data from a related language (Greenlandic) helps, and whether using contextual word embeddings improves translation. While each method showed some promise, the results are mixed.