A Data Selection Approach for Enhancing Low Resource Machine Translation Using Cross-Lingual Sentence Representations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a data filtering method using cross-lingual sentence representations to improve low-resource English-Marathi machine translation by removing noisy data and enhancing translation quality.

Contribution

It presents a novel filtering approach leveraging multilingual SBERT models to improve data quality in low-resource machine translation tasks.

Findings

Significant translation quality improvement after filtering

Effective removal of problematic translations using IndicSBERT

Framework applicable to other low-resource language pairs

Abstract

Machine translation in low-resource language pairs faces significant challenges due to the scarcity of parallel corpora and linguistic resources. This study focuses on the case of English-Marathi language pairs, where existing datasets are notably noisy, impeding the performance of machine translation models. To mitigate the impact of data quality issues, we propose a data filtering approach based on cross-lingual sentence representations. Our methodology leverages a multilingual SBERT model to filter out problematic translations in the training data. Specifically, we employ an IndicSBERT similarity model to assess the semantic equivalence between original and translated sentences, allowing us to retain linguistically correct translations while discarding instances with substantial deviations. The results demonstrate a significant improvement in translation quality over the baseline post-filtering with IndicSBERT. This illustrates how cross-lingual sentence representations can reduce errors in machine translation scenarios with limited resources. By integrating multilingual sentence BERT models into the translation pipeline, this research contributes to advancing machine translation techniques in low-resource environments. The proposed method not only addresses the challenges in English-Marathi language pairs but also provides a valuable framework for enhancing translation quality in other low-resource language translation tasks.