Machine Translation for Ge'ez Language

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1. Verfasser: Wassie, Aman Kassahun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Wassie, Aman Kassahun
author_facet Wassie, Aman Kassahun
contents Machine translation (MT) for low-resource languages such as Ge'ez, an ancient language that is no longer the native language of any community, faces challenges such as out-of-vocabulary words, domain mismatches, and lack of sufficient labeled training data. In this work, we explore various methods to improve Ge'ez MT, including transfer-learning from related languages, optimizing shared vocabulary and token segmentation approaches, finetuning large pre-trained models, and using large language models (LLMs) for few-shot translation with fuzzy matches. We develop a multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) model based on languages relatedness, which brings an average performance improvement of about 4 BLEU compared to standard bilingual models. We also attempt to finetune the NLLB-200 model, one of the most advanced translation models available today, but find that it performs poorly with only 4k training samples for Ge'ez. Furthermore, we experiment with using GPT-3.5, a state-of-the-art LLM, for few-shot translation with fuzzy matches, which leverages embedding similarity-based retrieval to find context examples from a parallel corpus. We observe that GPT-3.5 achieves a remarkable BLEU score of 9.2 with no initial knowledge of Ge'ez, but still lower than the MNMT baseline of 15.2. Our work provides insights into the potential and limitations of different approaches for low-resource and ancient language MT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_14530
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Machine Translation for Ge'ez Language
Wassie, Aman Kassahun
Computation and Language
Machine translation (MT) for low-resource languages such as Ge'ez, an ancient language that is no longer the native language of any community, faces challenges such as out-of-vocabulary words, domain mismatches, and lack of sufficient labeled training data. In this work, we explore various methods to improve Ge'ez MT, including transfer-learning from related languages, optimizing shared vocabulary and token segmentation approaches, finetuning large pre-trained models, and using large language models (LLMs) for few-shot translation with fuzzy matches. We develop a multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) model based on languages relatedness, which brings an average performance improvement of about 4 BLEU compared to standard bilingual models. We also attempt to finetune the NLLB-200 model, one of the most advanced translation models available today, but find that it performs poorly with only 4k training samples for Ge'ez. Furthermore, we experiment with using GPT-3.5, a state-of-the-art LLM, for few-shot translation with fuzzy matches, which leverages embedding similarity-based retrieval to find context examples from a parallel corpus. We observe that GPT-3.5 achieves a remarkable BLEU score of 9.2 with no initial knowledge of Ge'ez, but still lower than the MNMT baseline of 15.2. Our work provides insights into the potential and limitations of different approaches for low-resource and ancient language MT.
title Machine Translation for Ge'ez Language
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.14530