Findings of the LoResMT 2021 Shared Task on COVID and Sign Language for Low-resource Languages
This addresses the problem of limited translation resources for low-resource languages during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is incremental as it builds on existing shared task frameworks.
The paper presents findings from a shared task on machine translation for COVID-19 data in low-resource spoken and sign languages, reporting BLEU scores up to 36.0 for English-Irish and 31.3 for Marathi-English, but no submissions for the sign language task.
We present the findings of the LoResMT 2021 shared task which focuses on machine translation (MT) of COVID-19 data for both low-resource spoken and sign languages. The organization of this task was conducted as part of the fourth workshop on technologies for machine translation of low resource languages (LoResMT). Parallel corpora is presented and publicly available which includes the following directions: English$\leftrightarrow$Irish, English$\leftrightarrow$Marathi, and Taiwanese Sign language$\leftrightarrow$Traditional Chinese. Training data consists of 8112, 20933 and 128608 segments, respectively. There are additional monolingual data sets for Marathi and English that consist of 21901 segments. The results presented here are based on entries from a total of eight teams. Three teams submitted systems for English$\leftrightarrow$Irish while five teams submitted systems for English$\leftrightarrow$Marathi. Unfortunately, there were no systems submissions for the Taiwanese Sign language$\leftrightarrow$Traditional Chinese task. Maximum system performance was computed using BLEU and follow as 36.0 for English--Irish, 34.6 for Irish--English, 24.2 for English--Marathi, and 31.3 for Marathi--English.