We show that unsupervised sequence-segmentation performance can be transferred to extremely low-resource languages by pre-training a Masked Segmental Language Model (Downey et al., 2021) multilingually. Further, we show that this transfer can be achieved by training over a collection of low-resource languages that are typologically similar (but phylogenetically unrelated) to the target language. In our experiments, we transfer from a collection of 10 Indigenous American languages (AmericasNLP, Mager et al., 2021) to K’iche’, a Mayan language. We compare our multilingual model to a monolingual (from-scratch) baseline, as well as a model pre-trained on Quechua only. We show that the multilingual pre-trained approach yields consistent segmentation quality across target dataset sizes, exceeding the monolingual baseline in 6/10 experimental settings. Our model yields especially strong results at small target sizes, including a zero-shot performance of 20.6 F1. These results have promising implications for low-resource NLP pipelines involving human-like linguistic units, such as the sparse transcription framework proposed by Bird (2020).

This paper considers some ethical implications of machine translation for low-resourced languages. I use Armenian as a case study and investigate specific needs for and concerns arising from the creation and deployment of improved machine translation between English and Armenian. To do this, I conduct stakeholder interviews and construct Value Scenarios (Nathan et al., 2007) from the themes that emerge. These scenarios illustrate some of the potential harms that low-resourced language communities may face due to the deployment of improved machine translation systems. Based on these scenarios, I recommend 1) collaborating with stakeholders in order to create more useful and reliable machine translation tools, and 2) determining which other forms of language technology should be developed alongside efforts to improve machine translation in order to mitigate harms rendered to vulnerable language communities. Both of these goals require treating low-resourced machine translation as a language-specific, rather than language-agnostic, task.