# The first open machine translation system for the Chechen language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12672 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12672/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Multilingual Translation with Extensible Multilingual Pretraining and Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00401/) (2020)
- [MADLAD-400: A Multilingual And Document-Level Large Audited Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04662/) (2023)
- [Bilex Rx: Lexical Data Augmentation for Massively Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15265/) (2023)
- [The first neural machine translation system for the Erzya language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09368/) (2022)
- [Sub-Word Alignment Is Still Useful: A Vest-Pocket Method for Enhancing Low-Resource Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04067/) (2022)
- [Open Language Data Initiative: Advancing Low-Resource Machine Translation for Karakalpak](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04269/) (2024)
- [Neural machine translation system for Lezgian, Russian and Azerbaijani languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05472/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce the first open-source model for translation between the vulnerable Chechen language and Russian, and the dataset collected to train and evaluate it. We explore fine-tuning capabilities for including a new language into a large language model system for multilingual translation NLLB-200. The BLEU / ChrF++ scores for our model are 8.34 / 34.69 and 20.89 / 44.55 for translation from Russian to Chechen and reverse direction, respectively. The release of the translation models is accompanied by the distribution of parallel words, phrases and sentences corpora and multilingual sentence encoder adapted to the Chechen language.