In this paper we present the participation of the RETUYT-INCO team at the BEA-MLSP 2024 shared task. We followed different approaches, from Multilayer Perceptron models with word embeddings to Large Language Models fine-tuned on different datasets: already existing, crowd-annotated, and synthetic.Our best models are based on fine-tuning Mistral-7B, either with a manually annotated dataset or with synthetic data.

One of the main problems low-resource languages face in NLP can be pictured as a vicious circle: data is needed to build and test tools, but the available text is scarce and there are not powerful tools to collect it.In order to break this circle for Guarani, we explore if text automatically generated from a grammar can work as a Data Augmentation technique to boost the performance of Guarani-Spanish Machine Translation (MT) systems.After building a grammar-based system that generates Spanish text and syntactically transfers it to Guarani, we perform several experiments by pretraining models using this synthetic text.We find that the MT systems that are pretrained with synthetic text perform better, even outperforming previous baselines.

This work presents a parallel corpus of Guarani-Spanish text aligned at sentence level. The corpus contains about 30,000 sentence pairs, and is structured as a collection of subsets from different sources, further split into training, development and test sets. A sample of sentences from the test set was manually annotated by native speakers in order to incorporate meta-linguistic annotations about the Guarani dialects present in the corpus and also the correctness of the alignment and translation. We also present some baseline MT experiments and analyze the results in terms of the subsets. We hope this corpus can be used as a benchmark for testing Guarani-Spanish MT systems, and aim to expand and improve the quality of the corpus in future iterations.

Machine translation for low-resource languages, such as Guarani, is a challenging task due to the lack of data. One way of tackling it is using pretrained word embeddings for model initialization. In this work we try to check if currently available data is enough to train rich embeddings for enhancing MT for Guarani and Spanish, by building a set of word embedding collections and training MT systems using them. We found that the trained vectors are strong enough to slightly improve the performance of some of the translation models and also to speed up the training convergence.

We present a web application for creating games and exercises for teaching English as a foreign language with the help of NLP tools. The application contains different kinds of games such as crosswords, word searches, a memory game, and a multiplayer game based on the classic battleship pen and paper game. This application was built with the aim of supporting teachers in rural schools that are teaching English lessons, so they can easily create interactive and engaging activities for their students. We present the context and history of the project, the current state of the web application, and some ideas on how we will expand it in the future.

While Guarani is widely spoken in South America, obtaining a large amount of Guarani text from the web is hard. We present the building process of a Guarani corpus composed of a parallel Guarani-Spanish set of news articles, and a monolingual set of tweets. We perform some word embeddings experiments aiming at evaluating the quality of the Guarani split of the corpus, finding encouraging results but noticing that more diversity in text domains might be needed for further improvements.