Z u B idasoa: Participatory Research for the Development of Linguistic Technologies Adapted to the Needs of Migrants in the B asque Country (2025)

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the development of advanced language technologies, including the use of audio and images as part of multimodal systems. However, these models are not adapted to the specific needs of migrants and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) communicating in multilingual scenarios. In this project, we focus on the situation of migrants arriving in the Basque Country, nearby the western border between Spain and France. For identifying migrants’ needs, we have met with several organisations helping them in different stages, including: sea rescue; primary care in refugee camps and in situ; assistance with asylum demands; other administrative issues; and human rights defence in retention centres. In these interviews, Darija has been identified as the most spoken language among the under-served ones. Considering this, we have started the development of a Machine Translation (MT) system between Basque and Darija (Moroccan Arabic), based on open-source corpora. In this paper, we present the description of the project and the main results of the participatory research developed in the initial stage.

## introduction zubidasoa project aims to use mt as a bridge for improving the communication between migrants and ngos. the project, developed between hitz -upv/ehu and cnrs -iker umr5478, will last 3-4 years (from 2024 up to 2028) and is funded by the basque government (project reference: pos_2023_1_0035). the first stage of this project focuses on the participatory research carried out with 12 ngos assisting migrants in the basque country, based in the cross-border cities of donostia, irun, hendaia and baiona. for the first phase of this project, we have defined the following research questions foot_0 : more specifically, @xcite presents a platform to be used in asylum reception centres in belgium "to translate english, french or dutch text messages into a set of at least 14 languages, including low-resourced languages such as pashto, somali and tigrinya". compared to the previous work, the contributions of this project are the following: ## main results regarding the above research questions, from the ngo members interviewed we conclude that: the election of darija as a language is confirmed by a recent study foot_5 by gaindegia foot_6 , stating that morocco is the most common country of origin for migrants arriving in the basque country (after spain and france). even if modern standard arabic is the main written language in morocco, darija is the most spoken language (hcp, 2024). when written, darija uses both arabic and latin scripts. during this initial research, we have identified a dataset (outchakoucht and es-samaali, 2024) foot_7 with around 50,000 darija/english sentences. in addition, both basque and darija are included in flores+ foot_8 , making it easier to evaluate future systems in a standardised way. ## conclusion and future work based on these and newly created corpora, we plan to develop mt models between basque and darija, using encoder-decoder nmt systems and instruction-tuned language models derived from latxa @xcite . in the future, we plan to adapt the systems to the legal domain and extend them to other languages. we will also explore the possibility of translating audio and images using visual and multimodal language models.