Lia Shahnazaryan

Lia Shahnazaryan, Meriem Beloucif

Recent advancements in neural machine translation (NMT) have revolutionized the field, yet the dependency on extensive parallel corpora limits progress for low-resource languages and domains. Cross-lingual transfer learning offers a promising solution by utilizing data from high-resource languages but often struggles with in-domain NMT. This paper investigates zero-shot cross-lingual domain adaptation for NMT, focusing on the impact of domain specification and linguistic factors on transfer effectiveness. Using English as the source language and Spanish for fine-tuning, we evaluate multiple target languages, including Portuguese, Italian, French, Czech, Polish, and Greek. We demonstrate that both language-specific and domain-specific factors influence transfer effectiveness, with domain characteristics playing a crucial role in determining cross-domain transfer potential. We also explore the feasibility of zero-shot cross-lingual cross-domain transfer, providing insights into which domains are more responsive to transfer and why. Our results show the importance of well-defined domain boundaries and transparency in experimental setups for in-domain transfer learning.

Lia Shahnazaryan, Patrick Simianer, Joern Wuebker

We explore the impact of multi-source input strategies on machine translation (MT) quality, comparing GPT-4o, a large language model (LLM), with a traditional multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) system. Using intermediate language translations as contextual cues, we evaluate their effectiveness in enhancing English and Chinese translations into Portuguese. Results suggest that contextual information significantly improves translation quality for domain-specific datasets and potentially for linguistically distant language pairs, with diminishing returns observed in benchmarks with high linguistic variability. Additionally, we demonstrate that shallow fusion, a multi-source approach we apply within the NMT system, shows improved results when using high-resource languages as context for other translation pairs, highlighting the importance of strategic context language selection.