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Spanish-Turkish Low-Resource Machine Translation: Unsupervised Learning vs Round-Tripping

Received: 28 May 2020    Accepted: 18 June 2020    Published: 23 July 2020
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Abstract

The quality of data-driven Machine Translation (MT) strongly depends on the quantity as well as the quality of the training dataset. However, collecting a large set of training parallel texts is not easy in practice. Although various approaches have already been proposed to overcome this issue, the lack of large parallel corpora still poses a major practical problem for many language pairs. Since monolingual data plays an important role in boosting fluency for Neural MT (NMT) models, this paper investigates and compares the performance of two learning-based translation approaches for Spanish-Turkish translation as a low-resource setting in case we only have access to large sets of monolingual data in each language; 1) Unsupervised Learning approach, and 2) Round-Tripping approach. Either approach completely removes the need for bilingual data or enables us to train the NMT system relying on monolingual data only. We utilize an Attention-based NMT (Attentional NMT) model, which leverages a careful initialization of the parameters, the denoising effect of language models, and the automatic generation of bilingual data. Our experimental results demonstrate that the Unsupervised Learning approach outperforms the Round-Tripping approach in Spanish-Turkish translation and vice versa. These results confirm that the Unsupervised Learning approach is still a reliable learning-based translation technique for Spanish-Turkish low-resource NMT.

Published in American Journal of Artificial Intelligence (Volume 4, Issue 2)

This article belongs to the Special Issue Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages

DOI 10.11648/j.ajai.20200402.11
Page(s) 42-49
Creative Commons

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.

Copyright

Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Science Publishing Group

Keywords

Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Neural Machine Translation, Low-Resource Languages, Unsupervised Learning, Round-Tripping

References
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[2] Bahdanau D., Cho K., Bengio Y., Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate, Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations, 2015.
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[11] Ahmadnia B., Serrano, Haffari G., Balouchzahi NM., Direct-bridge combination scenario for Persian-Spanish low-resource statistical machine translation, Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language, 2018, 67-78.
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Cite This Article
  • APA Style

    Tianyi Xu, Ozge Ilkim Ozbek, Shannon Marks, Sri Korrapati, Benyamin Ahmadnia. (2020). Spanish-Turkish Low-Resource Machine Translation: Unsupervised Learning vs Round-Tripping. American Journal of Artificial Intelligence, 4(2), 42-49. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajai.20200402.11

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    ACS Style

    Tianyi Xu; Ozge Ilkim Ozbek; Shannon Marks; Sri Korrapati; Benyamin Ahmadnia. Spanish-Turkish Low-Resource Machine Translation: Unsupervised Learning vs Round-Tripping. Am. J. Artif. Intell. 2020, 4(2), 42-49. doi: 10.11648/j.ajai.20200402.11

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    AMA Style

    Tianyi Xu, Ozge Ilkim Ozbek, Shannon Marks, Sri Korrapati, Benyamin Ahmadnia. Spanish-Turkish Low-Resource Machine Translation: Unsupervised Learning vs Round-Tripping. Am J Artif Intell. 2020;4(2):42-49. doi: 10.11648/j.ajai.20200402.11

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  • @article{10.11648/j.ajai.20200402.11,
      author = {Tianyi Xu and Ozge Ilkim Ozbek and Shannon Marks and Sri Korrapati and Benyamin Ahmadnia},
      title = {Spanish-Turkish Low-Resource Machine Translation: Unsupervised Learning vs Round-Tripping},
      journal = {American Journal of Artificial Intelligence},
      volume = {4},
      number = {2},
      pages = {42-49},
      doi = {10.11648/j.ajai.20200402.11},
      url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajai.20200402.11},
      eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ajai.20200402.11},
      abstract = {The quality of data-driven Machine Translation (MT) strongly depends on the quantity as well as the quality of the training dataset. However, collecting a large set of training parallel texts is not easy in practice. Although various approaches have already been proposed to overcome this issue, the lack of large parallel corpora still poses a major practical problem for many language pairs. Since monolingual data plays an important role in boosting fluency for Neural MT (NMT) models, this paper investigates and compares the performance of two learning-based translation approaches for Spanish-Turkish translation as a low-resource setting in case we only have access to large sets of monolingual data in each language; 1) Unsupervised Learning approach, and 2) Round-Tripping approach. Either approach completely removes the need for bilingual data or enables us to train the NMT system relying on monolingual data only. We utilize an Attention-based NMT (Attentional NMT) model, which leverages a careful initialization of the parameters, the denoising effect of language models, and the automatic generation of bilingual data. Our experimental results demonstrate that the Unsupervised Learning approach outperforms the Round-Tripping approach in Spanish-Turkish translation and vice versa. These results confirm that the Unsupervised Learning approach is still a reliable learning-based translation technique for Spanish-Turkish low-resource NMT.},
     year = {2020}
    }
    

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  • TY  - JOUR
    T1  - Spanish-Turkish Low-Resource Machine Translation: Unsupervised Learning vs Round-Tripping
    AU  - Tianyi Xu
    AU  - Ozge Ilkim Ozbek
    AU  - Shannon Marks
    AU  - Sri Korrapati
    AU  - Benyamin Ahmadnia
    Y1  - 2020/07/23
    PY  - 2020
    N1  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajai.20200402.11
    DO  - 10.11648/j.ajai.20200402.11
    T2  - American Journal of Artificial Intelligence
    JF  - American Journal of Artificial Intelligence
    JO  - American Journal of Artificial Intelligence
    SP  - 42
    EP  - 49
    PB  - Science Publishing Group
    SN  - 2639-9733
    UR  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajai.20200402.11
    AB  - The quality of data-driven Machine Translation (MT) strongly depends on the quantity as well as the quality of the training dataset. However, collecting a large set of training parallel texts is not easy in practice. Although various approaches have already been proposed to overcome this issue, the lack of large parallel corpora still poses a major practical problem for many language pairs. Since monolingual data plays an important role in boosting fluency for Neural MT (NMT) models, this paper investigates and compares the performance of two learning-based translation approaches for Spanish-Turkish translation as a low-resource setting in case we only have access to large sets of monolingual data in each language; 1) Unsupervised Learning approach, and 2) Round-Tripping approach. Either approach completely removes the need for bilingual data or enables us to train the NMT system relying on monolingual data only. We utilize an Attention-based NMT (Attentional NMT) model, which leverages a careful initialization of the parameters, the denoising effect of language models, and the automatic generation of bilingual data. Our experimental results demonstrate that the Unsupervised Learning approach outperforms the Round-Tripping approach in Spanish-Turkish translation and vice versa. These results confirm that the Unsupervised Learning approach is still a reliable learning-based translation technique for Spanish-Turkish low-resource NMT.
    VL  - 4
    IS  - 2
    ER  - 

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Author Information
  • Department of Computer Science, Tulane University of Louisiana, New Orleans, United States

  • Department of Linguistics, Tulane University of Louisiana, New Orleans, United States

  • Department of Linguistics, Tulane University of Louisiana, New Orleans, United States

  • Department of Linguistics, Tulane University of Louisiana, New Orleans, United States

  • Department of Computer Science, Tulane University of Louisiana, New Orleans, United States; Department of Linguistics, University of California, Davis, United States

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