Tamarian, a fictional language introduced in the Star Trek episode Darmok, communicates meaning through utterances of metaphorical references, such as "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" instead of "We should work together." This work assembles a Tamarian-English dictionary of utterances from the original episode and several follow-on novels, and uses this to construct a parallel corpus of 456 English-Tamarian utterances. A machine translation system based on a large language model (T5) is trained using this parallel corpus, and is shown to produce an accuracy of 76% when translating from English to Tamarian on known utterances.
@article{arxiv.2107.08146,
title = {Picard understanding Darmok: A Dataset and Model for Metaphor-Rich Translation in a Constructed Language},
author = {Peter Jansen and Jordan Boyd-Graber},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.08146},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Accepted to the the 2022 Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (at EMNLP 2022)