# The first neural machine translation system for the Erzya language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.09368 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09368/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [Diverse Beam Search: Decoding Diverse Solutions from Neural Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02424/) (2016)
- [Multilingual Translation with Extensible Multilingual Pretraining and Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00401/) (2020)
- [CCMatrix: Mining Billions of High-Quality Parallel Sentences on the WEB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04944/) (2019)
- [When Being Unseen from mBERT is just the Beginning: Handling New Languages With Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12858/) (2020)
- [Margin-based Parallel Corpus Mining with Multilingual Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01136/) (2018)
- [Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03983/) (2022)
- [Facebook AI WMT21 News Translation Task Submission](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03265/) (2021)
- [Expanding Pretrained Models to Thousands More Languages via Lexicon-based Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09435/) (2022)
- [When Word Embeddings Become Endangered](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13275/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Transferability of BERT Models on Uralic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06327/) (2021)
- [Bridging the Data Gap between Training and Inference for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08394/) (2022)
- [Sub-Word Alignment Is Still Useful: A Vest-Pocket Method for Enhancing Low-Resource Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04067/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Open Language Data Initiative: Advancing Low-Resource Machine Translation for Karakalpak](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04269/) (2024)
- [Evaluating OpenAI GPT Models for Translation of Endangered Uralic Languages: A Comparison of Reasoning and Non-Reasoning Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16287/) (2025)
- [Sentiment Analysis Using Aligned Word Embeddings for Uralic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15380/) (2023)
- [Neural machine translation system for Lezgian, Russian and Azerbaijani languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05472/) (2024)
- [Dialectal and Low-Resource Machine Translation for Aromanian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17728/) (2024)
- [The first open machine translation system for the Chechen language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12672/) (2025)
- [Filling the Gap for Uzbek: Creating Translation Resources for Southern Uzbek](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14586/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the first neural machine translation system for translation between the endangered Erzya language and Russian and the dataset collected by us to train and evaluate it. The BLEU scores are 17 and 19 for translation to Erzya and Russian respectively, and more than half of the translations are rated as acceptable by native speakers. We also adapt our model to translate between Erzya and 10 other languages, but without additional parallel data, the quality on these directions remains low. We release the translation models along with the collected text corpus, a new language identification model, and a multilingual sentence encoder adapted for the Erzya language. These resources will be available at https://github.com/slone-nlp/myv-nmt.