Machine Translation Advancements of Low-Resource Indian Languages by Transfer Learning

Bin Wei, Jiawei Zheng, Zongyao Li, Zhanglin Wu, Jiaxin Guo, Daimeng Wei, Zhiqiang Rao, Shaojun Li, Yuanchang Luo, Hengchao Shang, Jinlong Yang, Yuhao Xie, Hao Yang

Abstract: This paper introduces the submission by Huawei Translation Center (HW-TSC) to the WMT24 Indian Languages Machine Translation (MT) Shared Task. To develop a reliable machine translation system for low-resource Indian languages, we employed two distinct knowledge transfer strategies, taking into account the characteristics of the language scripts and the support available from existing open-source models for Indian languages. For Assamese(as) and Manipuri(mn), we fine-tuned the existing IndicTrans2 open-source model to enable bidirectional translation between English and these languages. For Khasi(kh) and Mizo(mz), we trained a multilingual model as the baseline using bilingual data from this four language pairs as well as additional Bengali data, which share the same language family. This was followed by fine-tuning to achieve bidirectional translation between English and Khasi, as well as English and Mizo. Our transfer learning experiments produced significant results: 23.5 BLEU for en→as, 31.8 BLEU for en→mn, 36.2 BLEU for as→en, and 47.9 BLEU for mn→en on their respective test sets. Similarly, the multilingual model transfer learning experiments yielded impressive outcomes, achieving 19.7 BLEU for en→kh, 32.8 BLEU for en→mz, 16.1 BLEU for kh→en, and 33.9 BLEU for mz→en on their respective test sets. These results not only highlight the effectiveness of transfer learning techniques for low-resource languages but also contribute to advancing machine translation capabilities for low-resource Indian languages.