{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/unsupervised-translation-of-german-lower","title":"Unsupervised Translation of German--Lower Sorbian: Exploring Training and Novel Transfer Methods on a Low-Resource Language","arxiv_id":"2109.12012","date":"2021-09-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Lukas Edman","Ahmet Üstün","Antonio Toral","Gertjan van Noord"],"abstract":"This paper describes the methods behind the systems submitted by the University of Groningen for the WMT 2021 Unsupervised Machine Translation task for German--Lower Sorbian (DE--DSB): a high-resource language to a low-resource one. Our system uses a transformer encoder-decoder architecture in which we make three changes to the standard training procedure. First, our training focuses on two languages at a time, contrasting with a wealth of research on multilingual systems. Second, we introduce a novel method for initializing the vocabulary of an unseen language, achieving improvements of 3.2 BLEU for DE$\\rightarrow$DSB and 4.0 BLEU for DSB$\\rightarrow$DE. Lastly, we experiment with the order in which offline and online back-translation are used to train an unsupervised system, finding that using online back-translation first works better for DE$\\rightarrow$DSB by 2.76 BLEU. Our submissions ranked first (tied with another team) for DSB$\\rightarrow$DE and third for DE$\\rightarrow$DSB.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.12012v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.12012v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"unsupervised-translation-of-german-lower","repo_url":"https://github.com/leukas/wmt21","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"},{"task_slug":"unsupervised-machine-translation","task_name":"Unsupervised Machine Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}