Facilitating Access to Multilingual COVID-19 Information via Neural Machine Translation
This addresses the need for multilingual access to COVID-19 updates for health professionals and the public, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The paper tackles the problem of language barriers hindering access to COVID-19 information by developing neural machine translation systems for German, French, Italian, and Spanish to/from English, making them freely available to facilitate information assimilation.
Every day, more people are becoming infected and dying from exposure to COVID-19. Some countries in Europe like Spain, France, the UK and Italy have suffered particularly badly from the virus. Others such as Germany appear to have coped extremely well. Both health professionals and the general public are keen to receive up-to-date information on the effects of the virus, as well as treatments that have proven to be effective. In cases where language is a barrier to access of pertinent information, machine translation (MT) may help people assimilate information published in different languages. Our MT systems trained on COVID-19 data are freely available for anyone to use to help translate information published in German, French, Italian, Spanish into English, as well as the reverse direction.