CANTONMT: Investigating Back-Translation and Model-Switch Mechanisms for Cantonese-English Neural Machine Translation

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Hauptverfasser: Hong, Kung Yin, Han, Lifeng, Batista-Navarro, Riza, Nenadic, Goran
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Hong, Kung Yin
Han, Lifeng
Batista-Navarro, Riza
Nenadic, Goran
author_facet Hong, Kung Yin
Han, Lifeng
Batista-Navarro, Riza
Nenadic, Goran
contents This paper investigates the development and evaluation of machine translation models from Cantonese to English, where we propose a novel approach to tackle low-resource language translations. The main objectives of the study are to develop a model that can effectively translate Cantonese to English and evaluate it against state-of-the-art commercial models. To achieve this, a new parallel corpus has been created by combining different available corpora online with preprocessing and cleaning. In addition, a monolingual Cantonese dataset has been created through web scraping to aid the synthetic parallel corpus generation. Following the data collection process, several approaches, including fine-tuning models, back-translation, and model switch, have been used. The translation quality of models has been evaluated with multiple quality metrics, including lexicon-based metrics (SacreBLEU and hLEPOR) and embedding-space metrics (COMET and BERTscore). Based on the automatic metrics, the best model is selected and compared against the 2 best commercial translators using the human evaluation framework HOPES. The best model proposed in this investigation (NLLB-mBART) with model switch mechanisms has reached comparable and even better automatic evaluation scores against State-of-the-art commercial models (Bing and Baidu Translators), with a SacreBLEU score of 16.8 on our test set. Furthermore, an open-source web application has been developed to allow users to translate between Cantonese and English, with the different trained models available for effective comparisons between models from this investigation and users. CANTONMT is available at https://github.com/kenrickkung/CantoneseTranslation
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_08172
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CANTONMT: Investigating Back-Translation and Model-Switch Mechanisms for Cantonese-English Neural Machine Translation
Hong, Kung Yin
Han, Lifeng
Batista-Navarro, Riza
Nenadic, Goran
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
This paper investigates the development and evaluation of machine translation models from Cantonese to English, where we propose a novel approach to tackle low-resource language translations. The main objectives of the study are to develop a model that can effectively translate Cantonese to English and evaluate it against state-of-the-art commercial models. To achieve this, a new parallel corpus has been created by combining different available corpora online with preprocessing and cleaning. In addition, a monolingual Cantonese dataset has been created through web scraping to aid the synthetic parallel corpus generation. Following the data collection process, several approaches, including fine-tuning models, back-translation, and model switch, have been used. The translation quality of models has been evaluated with multiple quality metrics, including lexicon-based metrics (SacreBLEU and hLEPOR) and embedding-space metrics (COMET and BERTscore). Based on the automatic metrics, the best model is selected and compared against the 2 best commercial translators using the human evaluation framework HOPES. The best model proposed in this investigation (NLLB-mBART) with model switch mechanisms has reached comparable and even better automatic evaluation scores against State-of-the-art commercial models (Bing and Baidu Translators), with a SacreBLEU score of 16.8 on our test set. Furthermore, an open-source web application has been developed to allow users to translate between Cantonese and English, with the different trained models available for effective comparisons between models from this investigation and users. CANTONMT is available at https://github.com/kenrickkung/CantoneseTranslation
title CANTONMT: Investigating Back-Translation and Model-Switch Mechanisms for Cantonese-English Neural Machine Translation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08172