# ChakmaNMT: Machine Translation for a Low-Resource and Endangered Language via Transliteration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10219 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10219/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2024.

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

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- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06709/) (2015)
- [Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04558/) (2016)
- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [Six Challenges for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03872/) (2017)
- [On Using Monolingual Corpora in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03535/) (2015)
- [Not Low-Resource Anymore: Aligner Ensembling, Batch Filtering, and New Datasets for Bengali-English Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09359/) (2020)
- [Trivial Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00357/) (2018)
- [BanglaNLG and BanglaT5: Benchmarks and Resources for Evaluating Low-Resource Natural Language Generation in Bangla](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11081/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the first systematic study of machine translation for Chakma, an endangered and extremely low-resource Indo-Aryan language, with the goal of supporting language access and preservation. We introduce a new Chakma-Bangla parallel and monolingual dataset, along with a trilingual Chakma-Bangla-English benchmark for evaluation. To address script mismatch and data scarcity, we propose a character-level transliteration framework that exploits the close orthographic and phonological relationship between Chakma and Bangla, preserving semantic content while enabling effective transfer from Bangla and multilingual pretrained models. We benchmark from-scratch MT, fine-tuned pretrained models, and large language models via in-context learning. Results show that transliteration is essential and that fine-tuning and in-context learning substantially outperform from-scratch baselines, with strong asymmetry across translation directions.