Obtaining Parallel Sentences in Low-Resource Language Pairs with Minimal Supervision.

Abstract

Machine translation relies on parallel sentences, the number of which is an important factor affecting the performance of machine translation systems, especially in low-resource languages. Recent advances in learning cross-lingual word representations from nonparallel data by machine learning make a new possibility for obtaining bilingual sentences with minimal supervision in low-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology to obtain parallel sentences via only a small-size bilingual seed lexicon about hundreds of entries. We first obtain bilingual semantic by establishing cross-lingual mapping in monolingual languages via a seed lexicon. Then, we construct a deep learning classifier to extract bilingual parallel sentences. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology by harvesting Uyghur-Chinese parallel sentences and constructing a machine translation system. The experiments indicate that our method can obtain large and high-accuracy bilingual parallel sentences in low-resource language pairs.