# Data Augmentation and Terminology Integration for Domain-Specific Sinhala-English-Tamil Statistical Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02821 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02821/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Samanantar: The Largest Publicly Available Parallel Corpora Collection for 11 Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05596/) (2021)
- [Pre-Trained Multilingual Sequence-to-Sequence Models: A Hope for Low-Resource Language Translation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08850/) (2022)
- [Quality Does Matter: A Detailed Look at the Quality and Utility of Web-Mined Parallel Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07446/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Auxiliary Domain Parallel Data in Intermediate Task Fine-tuning for Low-resource Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01382/) (2023)
- [Unlocking Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Low-Resource Language Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04212/) (2024)
- [SiTSE: Sinhala Text Simplification Dataset and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01293/) (2024)
- [Improving the quality of Web-mined Parallel Corpora of Low-Resource Languages using Debiasing Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19074/) (2025)
- [Data Augmentation to Address Out-of-Vocabulary Problem in Low-Resource Sinhala-English Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08722/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Domain-Specific Parallel Data on Multilingual Language Models for Low-resource Language Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19522/) (2024)
- [Beyond Vanilla Fine-Tuning: Leveraging Multistage, Multilingual, and Domain-Specific Methods for Low-Resource Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22582/) (2025)
- [Metric Learning in Multilingual Sentence Similarity Measurement for Document Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09495/) (2021)
- [A Multi-way Parallel Named Entity Annotated Corpus for English, Tamil and Sinhala](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02056/) (2024)
- [Towards Global AI Inclusivity: A Large-Scale Multilingual Terminology Dataset (GIST)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18367/) (2024)
- [EnSiTa - A Trilingual Multi-Domain Parallel Dataset and Benchmark for Domain-Specific Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29511/) (2026)
- [Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction for Low Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16894/) (2024)
- [OasisSimp: An Open-source Asian-English Sentence Simplification Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14111/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Out of vocabulary (OOV) is a problem in the context of Machine Translation (MT) in low-resourced languages. When source and/or target languages are morphologically rich, it becomes even worse. Bilingual list integration is an approach to address the OOV problem. This allows more words to be translated than are in the training data. However, since bilingual lists contain words in the base form, it will not translate inflected forms for morphologically rich languages such as Sinhala and Tamil. This paper focuses on data augmentation techniques where bilingual lexicon terms are expanded based on case-markers with the objective of generating new words, to be used in Statistical machine Translation (SMT). This data augmentation technique for dictionary terms shows improved BLEU scores for Sinhala-English SMT.
