Tokenization on Trial: The Case of Kalaallisut–Danish Legal Machine Translation

Esther Ploeger, Paola Saucedo, Johannes Bjerva, Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan, Heather Lent

Publikation: Bidrag til bog/antologi/rapport/konference proceedingKonferenceartikel i proceedingForskningpeer review

Abstract

The strengths of subword tokenization have been widely demonstrated when applied to higher-resourced, morphologically simple languages.
However, it is not self-evident that these results transfer to lower-resourced, morphologically complex languages.
In this work, we investigate the influence of different subword segmentation techniques on machine translation between Danish and Kalaallisut, the official language of Greenland.
We present the first semi-manually aligned parallel corpus for this language pair, and use it to
compare subwords from unsupervised tokenizers and morphological segmenters.
We find that Unigram-based segmentation both preserves morphological boundaries and handles out-of-vocabulary words adequately, but that this does not directly correspond to superior translation quality.
We hope that our findings lay further groundwork for future efforts in neural machine translation for Kalaallisut.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TitelProceedings of the 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Lingustics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies : NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025
Publikationsdatomar. 2025
StatusAccepteret/In press - jan. 2025
BegivenhedThe 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Lingustics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies - Hestia Hotel Europa, Tallinn, Estland
Varighed: 2 mar. 20255 mar. 2025
https://www.nodalida-bhlt2025.eu/

Konference

KonferenceThe 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Lingustics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies
LokationHestia Hotel Europa
Land/OmrådeEstland
ByTallinn
Periode02/03/202505/03/2025
Internetadresse

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