The University of Edinburgh's English-Tamil and English-Inuktitut Submissions to the WMT20 News Translation Task

Rachel Bawden, Alexandra Birch, Radina Dobreva, Arturo Oncevay, Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone, Philip Williams

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

We describe the University of Edinburgh's submissions to the WMT20 news translation shared task for the low resource language pair English-Tamil and the mid-resource language pair English-Inuktitut. We use the neural machine translation transformer architecture for all submissions and explore a variety of techniques to improve translation quality to compensate for the lack of parallel training data. For the very low-resource English-Tamil, this involves exploring pretraining, using both language model objectives and translation using an unrelated high-resource language pair (German-English), and iterative backtranslation. For English-Inuktitut, we explore the use of multilingual systems, which, despite not being part of the primary submission, would have achieved the best results on the test set.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication5th Conference on Machine Translation, WMT 2020 - Proceedings
EditorsLoic Barrault, Ondrej Bojar, Fethi Bougares, Rajen Chatterjee, Marta R. Costa-Jussa, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Alexander Fraser, Yvette Graham, Paco Guzman, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, Andre Martins, Makoto Morishita, Christof Monz, Masaaki Nagata, Toshiaki Nakazawa, Matteo Negri
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages92-99
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781948087810
StatePublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event5th Conference on Machine Translation, WMT 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 19 Nov 202020 Nov 2020

Publication series

Name5th Conference on Machine Translation, WMT 2020 - Proceedings

Conference

Conference5th Conference on Machine Translation, WMT 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period19/11/2020/11/20

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