English

Neural machine translation for low-resource languages

Computation and Language 2017-08-22 v1

Abstract

Neural machine translation (NMT) approaches have improved the state of the art in many machine translation settings over the last couple of years, but they require large amounts of training data to produce sensible output. We demonstrate that NMT can be used for low-resource languages as well, by introducing more local dependencies and using word alignments to learn sentence reordering during translation. In addition to our novel model, we also present an empirical evaluation of low-resource phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) and NMT to investigate the lower limits of the respective technologies. We find that while SMT remains the best option for low-resource settings, our method can produce acceptable translations with only 70000 tokens of training data, a level where the baseline NMT system fails completely.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1708.05729,
  title  = {Neural machine translation for low-resource languages},
  author = {Robert Östling and Jörg Tiedemann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.05729},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

rejected from EMNLP 2017

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:18:16.157Z