Crawl and crowd to bring machine translation to under-resourced languages

• Published in: Language Resources and Evaluation Vol. 51; no. 4; pp. 1019 - 1051
• Main Authors: Toral, Antonio, Esplá-Gomis, Miquel, Klubička, Filip, Ljubešić, Nikola, Papavassiliou, Vassilis, Prokopidis, Prokopis, Rubino, Raphael, Way, Andy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer 01-12-2017; Springer Netherlands; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Computational Linguistics; Computer Science; Crowdsourcing; Digital media; English language; Language and Literature; Languages; Linguistics; Machine translation; Original Paper; Search engines; Sentences; Serbo-Croatian language; Soccer; Social media; Social networks; Social Sciences; Tourism; Translating; Crowdsourcing; Statistical machine translation; Web crawling
• ISSN: 1574-020X; 1572-8412; 1574-0218
• DOI: 10.1007/s10579-016-9363-6

We present a widely applicable methodology to bring machine translation (MT) to under-resourced languages in a cost-effective and rapid manner. Our proposal relies on web crawling to automatically acquire parallel data to train statistical MT systems if any such data can be found for the language pair and domain of interest. If that is not the case, we resort to (1) crowdsourcing to translate small amounts of text (hundreds of sentences), which are then used to tune statistical MT models, and (2) web crawling of vast amounts of monolingual data (millions of sentences), which are then used to build language models for MT. We apply these to two respective use-cases for Croatian, an under-resourced language that has gained relevance since it recently attained official status in the European Union. The first use-case regards tourism, given the importance of this sector to Croatia's economy, while the second has to do with tweets, due to the growing importance of social media. For tourism, we crawl parallel data from 20 web domains using two state-of-the-art crawlers and explore how to combine the crawled data with bigger amounts of general-domain data. Our domain-adapted system is evaluated on a set of three additional tourism web domains and it outperforms the baseline in terms of automatic metrics and/or vocabulary coverage. In the social media use-case, we deal with tweets from the 2014 edition of the soccer World Cup. We build domain-adapted systems by (1) translating small amounts of tweets to be used for tuning by means of crowdsourcing and (2) crawling vast amounts of monolingual tweets. These systems outperform the baseline (Microsoft Bing) by 7.94 BLEU points (5.11 TER) for Croatian-to-English and by 2.17 points (1.94 TER) for English-to-Croatian on a test set translated by means of crowdsourcing. A complementary manual analysis sheds further light on these results.