Machine Translation Through Cultural Texts: Can Verses and Prose Help Low-Resource Indigenous Models? (2024)

Abstract: We propose the first MT models for Innu-Aimun, an Indigenous language in Eastern Canada, in an effort to provide assistance tools for translation and language learning. This project is carried out in collaboration with an Innu community school and involves the participation of students in Innu-Aimun translation, within the framework of a meaningful consideration of Indigenous perspectives.Our contributions in this paper result from the three initial stages of this project. First, we aim to align bilingual Innu-Aimun/French texts with collaboration and participation of Innu-Aimun locutors. Second, we present the training and evaluation results of the MT models (both statistical and neural) based on these aligned corpora. And third, we collaboratively analyze some of the translations resulting from the MT models.We also see these developments for Innu-Aimun as a useful case study for answering a larger question: in a context where few aligned bilingual sentences are available for an Indigenous language, can cultural texts such as literature and poetry be used in the development of MT models?

## introduction innu-aimun, formerly known as montagnais (iso code moe, 1 glottolog mont1268) 2 , is the language of the innu, an indigenous people present in the quebec and labrador provinces of canada. it is a polysynthetic language, member of the algonquian language family and part of the cree-innu-naskapi dialect continuum @xcite . according to the latest statistics canada census (2021), an estimated 11,605 locutors speak innu-aimun, when including the related naskapi language. 3 this figure has seen a negative variation compared to the previous census (2016), 4 1 iso 639-3 -moe 2 glottolog -mont1268 3 statistics canada: indigenous languages in canada, 2021 4 indigenous languages across canada and unesco considers innu-aimun to be endangered/unsafe. 5 this echoes other assessments made by language specialists @xcite @xcite . a lack of available services in innu-aimun has been documented, with insufficient availability of professional translators and interpreters, for innu-aimun and for all indigenous languages in quebec. 6 in a revitalisation effort, a new professional innu-aimun translation and interpretation program is being offered. 7 in this context and with the aim of helping innu-aimun translators as well as language learners and users in general, we are taking the first steps to develop a machine translation (mt) system for the innu-aimun language and french language pair. this project is carried out in collaboration with the innu-aimun teaching staff of innu community school école kanatamat. the project also involves the participation of students in innu-aimun translation and interpretation from the new college program at cégep de sept îles. innu-aimun being originally an oral language, the innu have a rich tradition of oral storytelling but also, since more recently, an ever growing written, literature, including novels and poetry @xcite . it is for the most part written in french, with some publications in bilingual innu-aimun and french editions. although working with literary and poetic data presents big challenges, such as artistic and figurative translations or particular writing styles, we take these constraints as an opportunity to answer the following questions: can these types of texts have a positive impact on the results of machine translation models for innu-aimun and french languages? innu-aimun, as is generally the case with indigenous language in canada, is not covered by currently available mt systems. it is also underrepresented-if not absent-of large language models (llm) which are increasingly used as translation tools. in the face of recent questioning on the cultural sensitivity and awareness of general nmt models and llms, we propose a more culturally-aware approach, based on cultural texts and involving collaboration and participation of innu-aimun locutors. our paper is structured as follows. we present a brief state-of-the-art related to our topic in section 2 and our proposed methodology for the present study in section 3. section 4 presents results from the first mt models as well as qualitative observations and analyses. section 5 concludes this paper. ## related works the existing language technologies for innu-aimun today are mainly online language tools, such as a bilingual dictionary, a verb conjugation application and learning games @xcite . similar tools exist for the neighboring language of eastern cree. 8 other important building blocks, such as morphological models, have been developed for related languages among which plains cree is notable @xcite . a word segmentation tool based on deep learning has also been proposed for innu-aimun @xcite . the only indigenous language for which mt currently exists in canada is inuktitut. the development of mt for inuktitut was made possible by the availability of the nunavut hansard corpus, constructed from the bilingual inuktitut-english debates of the legislative assembly @xcite . this availability of data also made it possible to improve word segmentation (le and sadat, 2020) and the study of gender biases in the bilingual corpus @xcite . as several computational linguists have noted (notably bird (2020)), it is primordial, when working on indigenous language technology or resource development, to adopt a community-based and collaborative approach, to avoid repeating colonial research patterns. an exemplary participatory approach to neural machine translation (nmt) was demonstrated in the masakhane project for african languages @xcite . closer to indigenous languages in canada, @xcite has taken the necessary but often overlooked step of 8 an example is the bilingual east cree dictionary human evaluation of the indigenous language learning tool, in this case including by native speakers. in addition to research approaches, closer attention has also been brought to the cultural awareness in machine translation tools themselves, especially with the recent advent and ubiquity of large language models (llm). for example, @xcite have underlined the limits of nmt models and llms when it comes to translating sentences with cultural content and proposed a data curation pipeline and an evaluation metric to better address this issue. @xcite have benchmarked the performance of several state-of-the-art llms on cultural differences, using three of the largest and most represented cultural groups (american, chinese, and arab) and have noticed significant challenges even at this level of representation. ## conclusion the current study has shown how difficult it can be to obtain good translations when first developing mt for an indigenous language for which there are very few sentence pairs, and yet how the literary and poetic texts available, even if written in particular styles, can potentially contribute to building a general corpus for mt. we have also shown how at the present scale and types of available text for innu-aimun and french, smt offers much better results than nmt. we carried this project collaboratively, involving both computational linguistics researchers and innu-aimun teaching staff, and with the participation of indigenous and non-indigenous speakers of innu-aimun.