Consensus-Based Machine Translation for Code-Mixed Texts

Abstract

Multilingualism in India is widespread due to its long history of foreign acquaintances. This leads to the presence of an audience familiar with conversing using more than one language. Additionally, due to the social media boom, the usage of multiple languages to communicate has become extensive. Hence, the need for a translation system that can serve the novice and monolingual user is the need of the hour. Such translation systems can be developed by methods such as statistical machine translation and neural machine translation, where each approach has its advantages as well as disadvantages. In addition, the parallel corpus needed to build a translation system, with code-mixed data, is not readily available. In the present work, we present two translation frameworks that can leverage the individual advantages of these pre-existing approaches by building an ensemble model that takes a consensus of the final outputs of the preceding approaches and generates the target output. The developed models were used for translating English-Bengali code-mixed data (written in Roman script) into their equivalent monolingual Bengali instances. A code-mixed to monolingual parallel corpus was also developed to train the preceding systems. Empirical results show improved BLEU and TER scores of 17.23 and 53.18 and 19.12 and 51.29, respectively, for the developed frameworks.