The first open machine translation system for the Chechen language
This work addresses the lack of translation resources for the Chechen language, which is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new language.
The authors tackled the problem of machine translation for the vulnerable Chechen language by introducing the first open-source model for translation between Chechen and Russian, achieving BLEU scores of 8.34 for Russian-to-Chechen and 20.89 for Chechen-to-Russian.
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.