Facilitating Access to Multilingual COVID-19 Information via Neural Machine Translation

• Main Authors: Way, Andy, Haque, Rejwanul, Xie, Guodong, Gaspari, Federico, Popovic, Maja, Poncelas, Alberto
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01-05-2020
• Subjects: Computer Science - Computation and Language
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2005.00283

Every day, more people are becoming infected and dying from exposure to
COVID-19. Some countries in Europe like Spain, France, the UK and Italy have
suffered particularly badly from the virus. Others such as Germany appear to
have coped extremely well. Both health professionals and the general public are
keen to receive up-to-date information on the effects of the virus, as well as
treatments that have proven to be effective. In cases where language is a
barrier to access of pertinent information, machine translation (MT) may help
people assimilate information published in different languages. Our MT systems
trained on COVID-19 data are freely available for anyone to use to help
translate information published in German, French, Italian, Spanish into
English, as well as the reverse direction.