OCR Improves Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages

Machine Translation (MT) has recently been strengthened by the emergence of deep neural network techniques, which have brought the dream of language translation in community-based practices and clinical practices closer to reality. This chapter introduces the clinical practice of MT, especially in low resource languages. The following are some of the highlights of this chapter. How MT played a crucial role in good social reasons is focused on in this chapter. The chapter starts with the history of translation technologies that have played a vital role in various crisis and relief scenarios as the Haitian earthquake in 2010 and Translators without Borders (TWB), respectively. The Standby Task Force (SBTF) deployed the technology to tackle misinformation during Coronavirus Pandemic 2019. Next, the chapter explores the importance of the MT system, where it describes MT literacy as required across society to impact the healthcare of human beings. It describes the challenges of translation for clinical texts. Some of those are highlighted as (a) Domain: characteristics of clinical text differentiated from texts with other domains, (b) code mixed low-resource languages: noisy clinical data and lower quantity of data in the digital form available for computation, (c) lack of clinical domain corpora, and (d) very rich morphological structure: e.g., procedures (e.g., hepatico-cholangio-jejuno-stomy) and chemicals (e.g., Hydro-xy-nitro-di-hydro-thy-mine). Strategies or approaches to building MT on the clinical text can be categorized as: (1) Rule-based MT (early days), (2) Statistical MT (SMT, one of the successful methods in MT history), and (3) Neural MT (NMT, recent advancements of MT). Both SMT and NMT that work on same grounds by learning from text and are the primary focus of this chapter. L earning transparency for the patient's use of clinical data is an essential component. Much of today's healthcare data is unstructured text, such as clinical text, doctor's notes, nursing notes, lab reports, test reports, and more. A clinical practitioner is faced with a language barrier for communicating with a patient to interpret patient histories, examine a clinical diagnosis, or restate the recommended treatment method and follow-up to aid comprehension. The only way a medical practitioner encourages patients to ask questions or respond to queries is by directing them to input text with the help of MT. Finally, the chapter discusses contemporary techniques with Neural Machine Translation (NMT), namely multilingual, transfer learning on clinical data.

Recently, the data-driven machine learning approaches have shown their successes on many text classification tasks for a resource-abundant language. However, there are still many languages that lack of sufficient enough labeled data for carrying out the same specific tasks. They may be costly to obtain high-quality parallel corpus or cannot rely on automated machine translation due to unreliable or unavailable machine translation tools in those low-resource languages. In this work, we propose an effective transfer learning method in the scenarios where the large-scale cross-lingual data is not available. It combines transfer learning schemes of parameter sharing (parameter based) and domain adaptation (feature based) that are joint trained with high-resource and low-resource languages together. We conducted the cross-lingual transfer learning experiments on text classification on sentiment, subjectivity and question types from English to Chinese and from English to Vietnamese respectively. The experiments show that the proposed approach significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art models that are trained merely with monolingual data on the corresponding benchmarks.

Vocal Tract Length Normalization (VTLN) is used to design vocal tract length normalized Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. It has led to improvement in the performance of ASR systems by taking into account the physiological differences among speakers. Recently, a number of speech recognition applications are being developed for Indian languages. In this paper, we use state-of-the-art method for VTLN based on maximum likelihood approach. A vowel recognition system has been developed for two low resourced Indian languages, viz., Gujarati and Marathi. Appropriate warping factors have been obtained for all speakers considered for training and testing procedures. An improvement in the performance of vowel recognition is observed as compared to state-of-the-art Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC).

The availability of huge annotated datasets and deep learning have led to astounding Natural Language Processing (NLP) progress. However, there is a plethora of low-resource languages, lack the labelled corpora to train the models in the supervision. This kind of digital divide does not allow fair NLP development across language groups. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a new paradigm in recent years that leverages large amounts of untagged text to learn powerful representations with little or no manual annotation. This paper is a review of self-supervised deep learning models in low-resource NLP tasks. It begins with the definition of the principles of the SSL and the difference between this approach and supervised and unsupervised approaches. We describe why methods such as masked language modeling, contrastive learning, and autoregressive modeling underlie modern pre-trained transformers such as BERT, GPT, and mBERT. A particular interest is paid to multilingual and cross lingual SSL schemes which allow knowledge transfer between high-resource and low resource languages. Low-resource tasks, including machine translation, sentiment analysis, speech-to-text, and information retrieval are reviewed. As per benchmark studies, even in small labelled samples, the SSL models can achieve big gains in accuracy and generalization. Computation cost, representational bias and morphologically rich and under-documented language evaluation, are however, problematic. The researchers observe that the study suffers certain limitations, such as over-reliance on high-resource pretraining information, inequity between linguistic groups, and the difficulty of deploying large-scale SSL models in resource-constrained circumstances. The future directions include lightweight multilingual models, federation of learning in NLP and symbolic linguistic knowledge and combination with SSL. Self-supervised deep learning bridges an essential gap between the high-resource and low-resource languages, and would be a highly valuable step toward inclusive, global NLP innovation.

For the longest time, translation was a labor-intensive process that required just human effort. While human translation remains the most reliable method of textual content translation, it takes longer and is more expensive if done for each individual piece of information. Several Machine Translation (MT) approaches have recently emerged to facilitate the migration of any content across languages, especially for the low resource languages such as the Arabic Language. Given that Arabic is one of the world's most widely spoken languages, the task of Arabic machine translation has recently gotten a lot of interest from the scientific community. Indeed, the amount of study devoted to these low resources languages has resulted in some significant accomplishments; however, the status of Arabic MT systems falls short of the quality obtained for other languages. As a result, this survey examines the origins and main development timeline of MT approaches, investigates the significant branches, and categorizes different study orientations. In addition, it gives a comprehensive overview of the key research works that have been completed in the field of Arabic Neural MT (ANMT) and discusses possible future research prospects in this discipline.

Low-resource languages often face the problem of insufficient data, which leads to poor quality in machine translation. One approach to address this issue is data augmentation. Data augmentation involves creating new data by transforming existing data through methods such as flipping, cropping, rotating, and adding noise. Traditionally, pseudo-parallel corpora are generated by randomly replacing words in low-resource language machine translation. However, this method can introduce ambiguity, as the same word may have different meanings in different contexts. This study proposes a new approach for low-resource language machine translation, which involves generating pseudo-parallel corpora by replacing phrases. The performance of this approach is compared with other data augmentation methods, and it is observed that combining it with other data augmentation methods further improves performance. To enhance the robustness of the model, R-Drop regularization is also used. R-Drop is an effective method for improving the quality of machine translation. The proposed method was tested on Chinese–Kazakh (Arabic script) translation tasks, resulting in performance improvements of 4.99 and 7.7 for Chinese-to-Kazakh and Kazakh-to-Chinese translations, respectively. By combining the generation of pseudo-parallel corpora through phrase replacement with the application of R-Drop regularization, there is a significant advancement in machine translation performance for low-resource languages.

This study examines the efficacy of employing Indonesian as an intermediary language to improve the quality of translations from Javanese to Madurese through a pivot-based approach utilizing neural machine translation (NMT). The principal objective of this research is to enhance translation precision and uniformity among these low-resource languages, hence advancing machine translation models for underrepresented languages. The data collecting approach entailed extracting parallel texts from internet sources, followed by pre-processing through tokenization, normalization, and stop-word elimination algorithms. The prepared datasets were utilized to train and assess the NMT models. An intermediary phase utilizing Indonesian is implemented in the translation process to enhance the accuracy and consistency of translations between Javanese and Madurese. Parallel text corpora were created by collecting and preprocessing data, thereafter, utilized to train and assess the NMT models. The pivot-based strategy regularly surpassed direct translation regarding BLEU scores for all n-grams (BLEU-1 to BLEU-4). The enhanced BLEU ratings signify increased precision in vocabulary selection, preservation of context, and overall comprehensibility. This study significantly enhances the current literature in machine translation and computational linguistics, especially for low-resource languages, by illustrating the practical effectiveness of a pivot-based method for augmenting translation precision. The method's dependability and efficacy in producing genuine translations were proved through numerous studies. The pivot-based technique enhances translation quality, although it possesses limitations, including the risk of error propagation and bias originating from the pivot language. Further research is necessary to examine the integration of named entity recognition (NER) to improve accuracy and optimize the intermediate translation process. This project advances the domains of machine translation and the preservation of low-resource languages, with practical implications for multilingual communities, language education resources, and cultural conservation.

Due to the lack of structured language resources, low-resource language machine translation often faces difficulties in cross-language semantic paraphrasing. In order to solve the problem of low-resource machine translation from Indonesian to Chinese, a cognate-parallel-corpus-based expanding method of language resources is proposed, and an improved neural machine translation model is trained by the Malay-corpus-enhanced corpus. The improved model can achieve a comparable result as that of Google in the experiment of Indonesian-Chinese machine translation. The experimental results also show that the morphological similarity and semantic equivalence between the languages are very effective computational features to improve the performance of neural machine translation for low-resource languages.

Natural language processing (NLP) has significantly advanced our ability to model and interact with human language through technology. However, these advancements have disproportionately benefited high-resource languages with abundant data for training complex models. Low-resource languages, often spoken by smaller or marginalized communities, need help realizing the full potential of NLP applications. The primary challenges in developing NLP applications for low-resource languages stem from the need for large, well-annotated datasets, standardized tools, and linguistic resources. This scarcity of resources hinders the performance of data-driven approaches that have excelled in high-resource settings. Further, low-resource languages frequently exhibit complex grammatical structures, diverse vocabularies, and unique social contexts, which pose additional challenges for standard NLP techniques. Innovative strategies are emerging to address these challenges. Researchers are actively collecting and curating datasets, even utilizing community engagement platforms to expand data resources. Transfer learning, where models pre-trained on high-resource languages are adapted to low-resource settings, has shown significant promise. Multilingual models like Multilingual Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (mBERT) and Cross Lingual Models (XLM-R), trained on vast quantities of multilingual data, offer a powerful avenue for cross-lingual knowledge transfer. Additionally, researchers are exploring integrating multimodal approaches, combining textual data with images, audio, or video, to enhance NLP performance in low-resource language scenarios. This survey covers applications like part-of-speech tagging, morphological analysis, sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, dependency parsing, language identification, discourse annotation guidelines, question answering, machine translation, information retrieval, and predictive authoring for augmentative and alternative communication systems. The review also highlights machine learning approaches, deep learning approaches, Transformers, and cross-lingual transfer learning as practical techniques. Developing practical NLP applications for low-resource languages is crucial for preserving linguistic diversity, fostering inclusion within the digital world, and expanding our understanding of human language. While challenges remain, the strategies outlined in this survey demonstrate the ongoing progress and highlight the potential for NLP to empower communities that speak low-resource languages and contribute to a more equitable landscape within language technology.

India, celebrated for its vast linguistic diversity with 1,599 languages (including 122 prominent ones), exemplifies the richness of language variation. Indo-Aryan languages, spoken by 70% of the population, and Dravidian languages, used by 19%, create this diverse linguistic tapestry. Effective communication in this interconnected society is crucial, and machine translation plays a pivotal role in bridging language gaps. Speech is a cost-effective mode of interaction, particularly important in a globalized world. Machine translation, a part of natural language processing (NLP), aids in overcoming language barriers. This chapter presents enlightening case studies and valuable best practices, inspiring meaningful translation efforts for low-resource language communities. Together, we can break linguistic barriers, fostering a world of boundless communication and enduring cultural treasures. Challenges like limited linguistic resources, technological deficiencies, and community engagement issues persist.

This paper presents the system description of Machine Translation (MT) systems for English-Bangla language pair. Our goal was to create two benchmark MT systems that produce a better quality translation and comparatively higher evaluation score than existing MT systems for English to Bangla. In our experiments, we implemented two baseline MT systems using both statistical and neural methods for the said language pair. Our phrase-based statistical model and 2-layer LSTM neural model were trained and evaluated with a large dataset that is carefully pre-processed and contains unique training data to avoid biases from the cross-validation and test data. We achieved the highest scoring BLEU for our experiments with these setups. Furthermore, we improved the performance of the neural model using pre-trained embedding and synthetic monolingual data which are cutting-edge technology for neural models.

Over recent years, machine translation has achieved astounding accomplishments. Machine translation has become more evident with the need to understand the information available on the internet in different languages and due to the up-scaled exchange in international trade. The enhanced computing speed due to advancements in the hardware components and easy accessibility of the monolingual and bilingual data are the significant factors that have added up to boost the success of machine translation. This paper investigates the machine translation models developed so far to the current state-of-the-art providing a solid understanding of different architectures with the comparative evaluation and future directions for the translation task. Because hybrid models, neural machine translation, and statistical machine translation are the types of machine translation that are utilized the most frequently, it is essential to have an understanding of how each one functions. A comprehensive comprehension of the several approaches to machine translation would be made possible as a result of this. In order to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches, it is necessary to conduct an in-depth comparison of several models on a variety of benchmark datasets. The accuracy of translations from multiple models is compared using metrics such as the BLEU score, TER score, and METEOR score.

Mathematical Problem Solving in Arabic: Assessing Large Language Models

Machine translation (MT) for low-resource languages continues to face significant challenges because of limited digital resources and parallel corpora, despite remarkable developments in neural machine translation (NMT). Addressing these challenges requires a thorough review of existing research to identify effective strategies and methods. To achieve this, a systematic literature review (SLR) is conducted following PRISMA guidelines and systematically analysing studies published in various academic databases in the last five years (between 2020 and 2024). A total of 69 relevant articles were examined to evaluate the performance of MT, explore persistent challenges and assess the effectiveness of proposed or used solutions. The analysis shows that while NMT has emerged as the predominant approach, its effectiveness is often reduced by the scarcity of training data and the structural complexity of low-resource languages. Strategies such as active learning, data augmentation, multilingual model and transfer learning are identified as critical for improving translation performance. Additionally, emerging research trends, including data pre-processing, optimization of decoder and rule-based approach demonstrate promising directions for addressing existing limitations. In terms of evaluation, most of the studies used Character n-gram F-score (ChrF), Translation Edit Rate (TER), Metric for Evaluation of Translation with Explicit Ordering (METEOR), Word Error Rate (WER) and Bilingual Evaluation underscore (BLEU) as techniques’ validation metrics. This review provides a detailed evaluation of the current state of MT for low-resource languages and emphasizes the need for further research into underrepresented languages and the development of comprehensive datasets.

Machine translation (MT) has become increasingly important and popular in the past decade, leading to the development of MT evaluation metrics aiming at automatically assessing MT output. Most of these metrics use reference translations to compare systems output, therefore, they should not only detect MT errors but also be able to identify correct equivalent expressions so as not to penalize them when those are not displayed in the reference translations. With the aim of improving MT evaluation metrics a study has been carried out of a wide panorama of linguistic features and their implications. For that purpose a Spanish and an English corpora containing hypothesis and reference translations have been analysed from a linguistic point of view, so that common errors can be detected and positive equivalencies highlighted. This article focuses on this qualitative analysis describing the linguistic phenomena that should be considered when developing an automatic MT evaluation metric. The results of this analysis have been used to develop an automatic MT evaluation metric that takes into account different dimensions of language. A brief review of the metric and its evaluation are also provided.