American Journal of Artificial Intelligence

Special Issue

Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages

  • Submission Deadline: May 31, 2020
  • Status: Submission Closed
  • Lead Guest Editor: Benyamin Ahmadnia
About This Special Issue
The biggest issue with low-resource languages is the extreme difficulty of obtaining enough resources. Machine Translation (MT) has proven successful for several language pairs. However, each language comes with its own challenges. Low-resource languages have largely been left out of the MT revolution. In low-resource languages there are often very few written texts and of those that exist, they do not have a parallel text in another language. MT has made significant progress in recent years with a shift to statistical and neural models and rapid development of new architectures such as the transformer. However, current models trained on little parallel data tend to produce poor quality translations and without the parallel texts, statistical or neural MT will give subpar results. This challenge is exacerbated in the context of social media, where we need to enable communication for languages with no corresponding parallel corpora or unofficial languages. We are pleased to invite the academic community to respond to this issue on low-resource MT.
Research topic should be relevant to low-resource MT, including, but not limited to: Unsupervised statistical or neural MT for low-resource language pairs. Semi-supervised statistical or neural MT for low-resource language pairs. Pretraining methods leveraging monolingual data. Multilingual statistical or neural MT for low-resource languages.
Aims and Scope:
  1. Low-resource Languages
  2. Statistical Machine Translation
  3. Neural Machine Translation
  4. Active Learning
  5. Unsupervised Learning
  6. Semi-supervised Learning
  7. Dual Learning
  8. Round-tripping
  9. Bridge Language
  10. Bootstrapping
Lead Guest Editor
  • Benyamin Ahmadnia

    Department of Computer Science, Tulane University, New Orleans, United States

Guest Editors
  • Bonnie J Dorr

    Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), Ocala, United States

  • Hossein Sarrafzadeh

    Department of Cybersecurity, St. Bonaventure University, St. Bonaventure, United States

  • Javier Serrano

    Department of Telecommunications and Systems Engineering, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Cerdanyola del Valles, Spain

  • Mahsa Mohaghegh

    School of Engineering, Computer, and Mathematical Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

  • Mojtaba Sabbagh-Jafari

    Department of Computer Engineering, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran

  • Pariya Razmdideh

    Department of Linguistics and Translation Studies, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran

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

    Tianyi Xu , Ozge Ilkim Ozbek , Shannon Marks , Sri Korrapati , Benyamin Ahmadnia

    Issue: Volume 4, Issue 2, December 2020
    Pages: 42-49
    Received: May 28, 2020
    Accepted: Jun. 18, 2020
    Published: Jul. 23, 2020
    DOI: 10.11648/j.ajai.20200402.11
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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... Show More