A Domain Specific Parallel Corpus and Enhanced English-Assamese Neural Machine Translation

Abstract

Machine translation deals with automatic translation from one natural language to another. Neural machine translation is a widely accepted technique of the corpus-based machine translation approach. However, an adequate amount of training data is required, and there is a need for the domain-wise parallel corpus to improve translational performance that shows translational coverages in various domains. In this work, a domain-specific parallel corpus is prepared that includes different domain coverages, namely, Agriculture, Government Office, Judiciary, Social Media, Tourism, COVID-19, Sports, and Literature domains for low-resource English-Assamese pair translation. Moreover, we have tackled data scarcity and word-order divergence problems via data augmentation and prior alignment concept. Also, we have contributed Assamese pretrained LM, Assamese word-embeddings by utilizing Assamese monolingual data, and a bilingual dictionary-based post-processing step to enhance transformer-based neural machine translation. We have achieved state-of-the-art results for both forward (English-to-Assamese) and backward (Assamese-to-English) directions of translation.