Enhancing Taiwanese Hokkien Dual Translation by Exploring and Standardizing of Four Writing Systems

Bo-Han Lu, Yi-Hsuan Lin, Annie Lee, Richard Tzong-Han Tsai


Abstract
Machine translation focuses mainly on high-resource languages (HRLs), while low-resource languages (LRLs) like Taiwanese Hokkien are relatively under-explored. The study aims to address this gap by developing a dual translation model between Taiwanese Hokkien and both Traditional Mandarin Chinese and English. We employ a pre-trained LLaMA 2-7B model specialized in Traditional Mandarin Chinese to leverage the orthographic similarities between Taiwanese Hokkien Han and Traditional Mandarin Chinese. Our comprehensive experiments involve translation tasks across various writing systems of Taiwanese Hokkien as well as between Taiwanese Hokkien and other HRLs. We find that the use of a limited monolingual corpus still further improves the model’s Taiwanese Hokkien capabilities. We then utilize our translation model to standardize all Taiwanese Hokkien writing systems into Hokkien Han, resulting in further performance improvements. Additionally, we introduce an evaluation method incorporating back-translation and GPT-4 to ensure reliable translation quality assessment even for LRLs. The study contributes to narrowing the resource gap for Taiwanese Hokkien and empirically investigates the advantages and limitations of pre-training and fine-tuning based on LLaMA 2.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.538
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
6077–6090
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.538
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bo-Han Lu, Yi-Hsuan Lin, Annie Lee, and Richard Tzong-Han Tsai. 2024. Enhancing Taiwanese Hokkien Dual Translation by Exploring and Standardizing of Four Writing Systems. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 6077–6090, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Taiwanese Hokkien Dual Translation by Exploring and Standardizing of Four Writing Systems (Lu et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.538.pdf