# Machine Translation by Projecting Text into the Same Phonetic-Orthographic Space Using a Common Encoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12371 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12371/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [Subword Regularization: Improving Neural Network Translation Models with Multiple Subword Candidates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10959/) (2018)
- [Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04558/) (2016)
- [OpenNMT: Open-source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03815/) (2017)
- [Fixed Encoder Self-Attention Patterns in Transformer-Based Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10260/) (2020)
- [PMIndia -- A Collection of Parallel Corpora of Languages of India](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09907/) (2020)
- [IndicBART: A Pre-trained Model for Indic Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02903/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Low Resource Status of Indian Languages in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04860/) (2020)
- [The word entropy of natural languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06996/) (2016)
- [Linguistic Resources for Bhojpuri, Magahi and Maithili: Statistics about them, their Similarity Estimates, and Baselines for Three Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13945/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Orthographic Information in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01391/) (2020)
- [Evolutionary Multi Objective Optimization Algorithm for Community Detection in Complex Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03181/) (2020)
- [The boundaries of meaning: a case study in neural machine translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00613/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The use of subword embedding has proved to be a major innovation in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). It helps NMT to learn better context vectors for Low Resource Languages (LRLs) so as to predict the target words by better modelling the morphologies of the two languages and also the morphosyntax transfer. Even so, their performance for translation in Indian language to Indian language scenario is still not as good as for resource-rich languages. One reason for this is the relative morphological richness of Indian languages, while another is that most of them fall into the extremely low resource or zero-shot categories. Since most major Indian languages use Indic or Brahmi origin scripts, the text written in them is highly phonetic in nature and phonetically similar in terms of abstract letters and their arrangements. We use these characteristics of Indian languages and their scripts to propose an approach based on common multilingual Latin-based encodings (WX notation) that take advantage of language similarity while addressing the morphological complexity issue in NMT. These multilingual Latin-based encodings in NMT, together with Byte Pair Embedding (BPE) allow us to better exploit their phonetic and orthographic as well as lexical similarities to improve the translation quality by projecting different but similar languages on the same orthographic-phonetic character space. We verify the proposed approach by demonstrating experiments on similar language pairs (Gujarati-Hindi, Marathi-Hindi, Nepali-Hindi, Maithili-Hindi, Punjabi-Hindi, and Urdu-Hindi) under low resource conditions. The proposed approach shows an improvement in a majority of cases, in one case as much as ~10 BLEU points compared to baseline techniques for similar language pairs. We also get up to ~1 BLEU points improvement on distant and zero-shot language pairs.