Get away with less: Need of source side data curation to build parallel corpus for low resource Machine Translation

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Hauptverfasser: Yadav, Saumitra, Shrivastava, Manish
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Yadav, Saumitra
Shrivastava, Manish
author_facet Yadav, Saumitra
Shrivastava, Manish
contents Data curation is a critical yet under-researched step in the machine translation training paradigm. To train translation systems, data acquisition relies primarily on human translations and digital parallel sources or, to a limited degree, synthetic generation. But, for low-resource languages, human translation to generate sufficient data is prohibitively expensive. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a framework that screens source sentences to form efficient parallel text, ensuring optimal MT system performance in low-resource environments. We approach this by evaluating English-Hindi bi-text to determine effective sentence selection strategies for optimal MT system training. Our extensively tested framework, (Lexical And Linguistically Informed Text Analysis) LALITA, targets source sentence selection using lexical and linguistic features to curate parallel corpora. We find that by training mostly on complex sentences from both existing and synthetic datasets, our method significantly improves translation quality. We test this by simulating low-resource data availabilty with curated datasets of 50K to 800K English sentences and report improved performances on all data sizes. LALITA demonstrates remarkable efficiency, reducing data needs by more than half across multiple languages (Hindi, Odia, Nepali, Norwegian Nynorsk, and German). This approach not only reduces MT systems training cost by reducing training data requirement, but also showcases LALITA's utility in data augmentation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_08629
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Get away with less: Need of source side data curation to build parallel corpus for low resource Machine Translation
Yadav, Saumitra
Shrivastava, Manish
Computation and Language
Data curation is a critical yet under-researched step in the machine translation training paradigm. To train translation systems, data acquisition relies primarily on human translations and digital parallel sources or, to a limited degree, synthetic generation. But, for low-resource languages, human translation to generate sufficient data is prohibitively expensive. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a framework that screens source sentences to form efficient parallel text, ensuring optimal MT system performance in low-resource environments. We approach this by evaluating English-Hindi bi-text to determine effective sentence selection strategies for optimal MT system training. Our extensively tested framework, (Lexical And Linguistically Informed Text Analysis) LALITA, targets source sentence selection using lexical and linguistic features to curate parallel corpora. We find that by training mostly on complex sentences from both existing and synthetic datasets, our method significantly improves translation quality. We test this by simulating low-resource data availabilty with curated datasets of 50K to 800K English sentences and report improved performances on all data sizes. LALITA demonstrates remarkable efficiency, reducing data needs by more than half across multiple languages (Hindi, Odia, Nepali, Norwegian Nynorsk, and German). This approach not only reduces MT systems training cost by reducing training data requirement, but also showcases LALITA's utility in data augmentation.
title Get away with less: Need of source side data curation to build parallel corpus for low resource Machine Translation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08629