arXiv:2501.00045cs.CLcs.LG2025-01被引 2

用语言相似的高资源语种迁移,提升低资源翻译质量

Improving Low-Resource Machine Translation via Cross-Linguistic Transfer from Typologically Similar High-Resource Languages

  • 用语法结构相似的高资源语言预训练模型,微调低资源语言
  • 五组跨语系语言对均实现翻译质量提升,证明方法普适性
  • 小批量、适中学习率更稳定,适合非近亲语言迁移

本研究通过在语法类型相近的高资源语言上预训练模型,再以少量目标低资源语言数据进行微调,检验跨语言迁移在低资源机器翻译中的有效性。实验涵盖五组跨语系语言对:闪米特语族(现代标准阿拉伯语→黎凡特阿拉伯语)、班图语族(豪萨语→祖鲁语)、罗曼语族(西班牙语→加泰罗尼亚语)、斯拉夫语族(斯洛伐克语→马其顿语)以及语言孤岛(东部亚美尼亚语→西部亚美尼亚语)。结果表明,迁移学习在所有语言对上均显著提升翻译质量,验证了其在非近亲语言间的适用性。进一步分析不同超参数(学习率、批量大小、训练轮数、权重衰减)发现,中等批量大小(如32)通常最优,而远亲语言对更适合较小批量;过高的学习率会引发训练不稳。研究为低资源场景下构建高效翻译系统提供了实证支持与可操作建议。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

This study examines the cross-linguistic effectiveness of transfer learning for low-resource machine translation by fine-tuning models initially trained on typologically similar high-resource languages, using limited data from the target low-resource language. We hypothesize that linguistic similarity enables efficient adaptation, reducing the need for extensive training data. To test this, we conduct experiments on five typologically diverse language pairs spanning distinct families: Semitic (Modern Standard Arabic to Levantine Arabic), Bantu (Hausa to Zulu), Romance (Spanish to Catalan), Slavic (Slovak to Macedonian), and a language isolate (Eastern Armenian to Western Armenian). Results show that transfer learning consistently improves translation quality across all pairs, confirming its applicability beyond closely related languages. As a secondary analysis, we vary key hyperparameters learning rate, batch size, number of epochs, and weight decay to ensure results are not dependent on a single configuration. We find that moderate batch sizes (e.g., 32) are often optimal for similar pairs, smaller sizes benefit less similar pairs, and excessively high learning rates can destabilize training. These findings provide empirical evidence for the generalizability of transfer learning across language families and offer practical guidance for building machine translation systems in low-resource settings with minimal tuning effort.

机器翻译迁移学习低资源跨语言

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