TAN - IBE : Neural Machine Translation for the romance languages of the I berian Peninsula (2023)

Abstract: The main goal of this project is to explore the techniques for training NMT systems applied to Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Asturian, Aragonese and Aranese. These languages belong to the same Romance family, but they are very different in terms of the linguistic resources available. Asturian, Aragonese and Aranese can be considered low resource languages. These characteristics make this setting an excellent place to explore training techniques for low-resource languages: transfer learning and multilingual systems, among others. The first months of the project have been dedicated to the compilation of monolingual and parallel corpora for Asturian, Aragonese and Aranese.

## introduction the main goal of this project is to explore the techniques for training nmt systems applied to spanish, portuguese, catalan, galician, asturian, aragonese and aranese, a standardized subvariety of gascon, which is a variety of occitan. aranese has the status of official language in the autonomous community of catalonia. these languages belong to the same romance family, but they are very different in terms of the linguistic resources available. asturian, aragonese and aranese can be considered low-resource languages. these characteristics make this setting an excellent place to explore training techniques for low-resource languages: transfer learning and multilingual systems, among others. the first months of the project have been dedicated to the compilation of monolingual and parallel corpora for asturian, aragonese and aranese. ## project objectives the project's main objective is to design, train and evaluate nmt systems between the romance languages of the iberian peninsula. this objective will be achieved through the following specific objectives: ## summary of partial results the project started on september 2022 and during these first months we have concentrated the activity in the compilation of language resources for asturian, aragonese and aranese. we have also developed several scripts and programs to assist in the tasks of compiling existing parallel corpora and creating new parallel corpora.