Sheffield's Submission to the AmericasNLP Shared Task on Machine Translation into Indigenous Languages
This work addresses the challenge of improving translation quality for indigenous languages, which is an incremental advancement in a domain-specific shared task.
The paper tackled machine translation from Spanish to eleven indigenous languages by extending, training, and ensembling variations of NLLB-200, achieving the highest average chrF on the test set and ranking first in four languages.
In this paper we describe the University of Sheffield's submission to the AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task on Machine Translation into Indigenous Languages which comprises the translation from Spanish to eleven indigenous languages. Our approach consists of extending, training, and ensembling different variations of NLLB-200. We use data provided by the organizers and data from various other sources such as constitutions, handbooks, news articles, and backtranslations generated from monolingual data. On the dev set, our best submission outperforms the baseline by 11% average chrF across all languages, with substantial improvements particularly for Aymara, Guarani and Quechua. On the test set, we achieve the highest average chrF of all the submissions, we rank first in four of the eleven languages, and at least one of our submissions ranks in the top 3 for all languages.