MACHINE TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION INVOLVING RELATED, LOW-RESOURCE LANGUAGES

Machine Translation and Transliteration involving Related, Low-resource Languages discusses an important aspect of natural language processing that has received lesser attention: translation and transliteration involving related languages in a low-resource setting. This is a very relevant real-world scenario for people living in neighbouring states/provinces/countries who speak similar languages and need to communicate with each other, but training data to build supporting MT systems is limited. The book discusses different characteristics of related languages with rich examples and draws connections between two problems: translation for related languages and transliteration. It shows how linguistic similarities can be utilized to learn MT systems for related languages with limited data. It comprehensively discusses the use of subword-level models and multilinguality to utilize these linguistic similarities. The second part of the book explores methods for machine transliteration involving related languages based on multilingual and unsupervised approaches. Through extensive experiments over a wide variety of languages, the efficacy of these methods is established.