Morocco

Low-resource languages like Urdu suffer from limited high quality parallel data for machine translation. We introduce a curated English--Urdu corpus of 80,749 high-fidelity sentence pairs across 18 diverse domains, built via ethical collection, manual alignment, deduplication, and strict length-based filtering (AWCD $\leq$ 5). The corpus is converted into a bidirectional SFT dataset with bilingual (English/Urdu) instructions to enhance prompt-language robustness. Fine-tuning Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct (Llama-FT) and UrduLlama 1.1 (UrduLlama-FT) yields major gains over the baseline. sacreBLEU scores reach 24.65--25.24 (En$\to$Ur) and 76.14--77.97 (Ur$\to$En) for Llama-FT, with minimal sensitivity to prompt language. Blind human evaluation on 90 sentences per direction confirms substantial perceptual improvements. Results demonstrate the value of clean parallel data and bilingual instruction tuning, revealing complementary benefits of general SFT versus Urdu specific pretraining. This work provides a reproducible resource and pipeline to advance Urdu machine translation and similar low-resource languages.

EACL 2026

Building and Evaluating a High Quality Parallel Corpus for English Urdu Low Resource Machine Translation

urdu-english mt

llms

machine translation

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#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
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Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

This paper presents a set of linguistic resources that describes Quechua verbs. We first present a dictionary of 1,444 fundamental Quechua verbs, associated with morpho-syntactic grammars to formalize their inflection and their derivations, that can be used to produce over 2,777,000 conjugated Quechua derived verbal forms. We aligned this list of Quechua verbal forms with the corresponding Spanish dictionary that contains 618,000 conjugated verbal forms, thus producing both a Spanish to Quechua and a Quechua to Spanish dictionary.

Semi-Automatic construction of a Quechua-Spanish dictionary

Machine translation for Indigenous and other low-resource languages is constrained by limited parallel data, orthographic variation, and evaluation instability for morphologically rich languages. In this work, we study Spanish–Aymara, Spanish–Guarani, and Spanish–Quechua translation in the context of the AmericasNLP benchmarks, focusing on data-centric improvements rather than architectural changes. We augment curated parallel corpora with forward-translated synthetic sentence pairs generated using a high-capacity multilingual translation model, while applying conservative, language-specific preprocessing tailored to each language. Training data is filtered using length-ratio constraints and deduplication, whereas official development sets are left unfiltered to ensure fair evaluation. We fine-tune a multilingual mBART model under curated-only and curated+synthetic settings and evaluate performance primarily using chrF++, which is better suited for agglutinative languages than BLEU. Across all three languages, synthetic data augmentation consistently improves chrF++, with the largest gains observed for Aymara and Guarani, while Quechua benefits primarily from deterministic orthographic normalization. Our analysis highlights both the effectiveness and the limitations of generic preprocessing for highly agglutinative languages, suggesting that data-centric augmentation and language-aware normalization are strong, reproducible baselines for low-resource Indigenous language machine translation.

Improving Indigenous Language Machine Translation with Synthetic Data and Language-Specific Preprocessing

Neural machine translation has achieved remarkable results for high-resource languages, yet language isolates – those with no demonstrated genetic relatives – remain severely underserved, as they cannot benefit from cross-lingual transfer with related languages. We present the first NMT system for Nivkh, a critically endangered language isolate spoken by fewer than 100 fluent speakers in the Russian Far East. Working with approximately 9.5k parallel sentences – expanded through fine-tuned LaBSE sentence alignment – we adapt NLLB-200 to Nivkh-Russian translation. Since Nivkh is absent from NLLB's language inventory, we investigate proxy language token selection, comparing six typologically diverse languages: Bashkir, Kazakh, Halh Mongolian, Turkish, Tajik, and French. We find that using any proxy substantially outperforms random token initialization (BLEU 18-19.02 vs. 15.44 for rus→niv), confirming the value of proxy-based transfer. However, the choice of which proxy has minimal impact, with all six achieving comparable results despite spanning four language families and two scripts. This suggests that for language isolates, practitioners can select any typologically reasonable proxy without significant performance penalty. We additionally present preliminary experiments on dialect-specific models for Amur and Sakhalin Nivkh. Our findings establish baseline results for future Nivkh NLP research and provide practical guidance for adapting multilingual models to other language isolates.

Adapting Multilingual NMT to Language Isolates: The Role of Proxy Language Selection and Dialect Handling for Nivkh

Machine translation (MT) evaluation is central in guiding researchers on how to improve a model's performance. Current automatic evaluation practices fail to provide reliable insights into the specific translation errors that occur, especially for low-resource languages. This paper introduces the Lux-MT-Test-Suite, enabling a linguistically motivated and fine-grained analysis of Luxembourgish–English (LB-EN) MT based on 896 test items covering 12 linguistic categories and 36 linguistic phenomena. We compare a baseline local LLM (Gemma 3), its fine-tuned counterpart (LuxMT), and a proprietary state-of-the-art LLM (GPT-5) to analyse what local LLMs learn through fine-tuning in a low-resource setting and to assess performance differences between local and proprietary systems. The findings identify specific performance gains through fine-tuning, minor degradations, a difference in translation strategies, performance gaps between local and proprietary models, and remaining challenges.

A Fine-Grained Linguistic Evaluation of Low-Resource Luxembourgish–English MT

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems rely heavily on explicit punctuation cues to resolve semantic ambiguities in a source sentence. Inputting user-generated sentences, which are likely to contain missing or incorrect punctuation, results in fluent but semantically disastrous translations. This work attempts to highlight and address the problem of punctuation robustness of NMT systems through an English-to-Marathi translation. First, we introduce \textbf{\textit{Vir\=am}}, a human-curated diagnostic benchmark of 54 punctuation-ambiguous English-Marathi sentence pairs to stress-test existing NMT systems. Second, we evaluate two simple remediation strategies: cascade-based \textit{restore-then-translate} and \textit{direct fine-tuning}. Our experimental results and analysis demonstrate that both strategies yield substantial NMT performance improvements. Furthermore, we find that current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit relatively poorer robustness in translating such sentences than these task-specific strategies, thus necessitating further research in this area. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/KaustubhShejole/Viram_Marathi.

Assessing and Improving Punctuation Robustness in English-Marathi Machine Translation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across many downstream tasks, yet their effectiveness in extremely low-resource machine translation remains limited. Standard adaptation techniques typically rely on large-scale parallel data or extensive fine-tuning, which are infeasible for the long tail of underrepresented languages. In this work, we investigate a more constrained question: in data-scarce settings, to what extent can linguistically similar pivot languages and few-shot demonstrations provide useful guidance for on-the-fly adaptation in LLMs? We study a data-efficient experimental setup that combines linguistically related pivot languages with few-shot in-context examples, without any parameter updates, and evaluate translation behavior under controlled conditions. Our analysis shows that while pivot-based prompting can yield improvements in certain configurations, particularly in settings where the target language is less well represented in the model’s vocabulary, the gains are often modest and sensitive to few shot example construction. For closely related or better represented varieties, we observe diminishing or inconsistent gains. Broadly, our findings provide empirical guidance on how and when inference-time prompting and pivot-based examples can be used as a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning in low-resource translation settings.

Can Linguistically Related Languages Guide LLM Translation in Low-Resource Settings?

We explore machine translation for five Turkic language pairs: Russian-Bashkir, Russian-Kazakh, Russian-Kyrgyz, English-Tatar, English-Chuvash. Fine-tuning nllb-200-distilled-600M with LoRA on synthetic data achieved chrF++ 49.71 for Kazakh and 46.94 for Bashkir. Prompting DeepSeek-V3.2 with retrieved similar examples achieved chrF++ 39.47 for Chuvash. For Tatar, zero-shot or retrieval-based approaches achieved chrF++ 41.6, while for Kyrgyz the zero-shot approach reached 45.6. We release the dataset and the obtained weights.

No One-Size-Fits-All: Building Systems For Translation to Bashkir, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar and Chuvash Using Synthetic And Original Data

This paper describes the submission of Team DevLake for the LoResMT 2026 Shared Task on Russian-Bashkir machine translation. We conducted a comprehensive comparative study of three distinct neural architectures: NLLB-200 (1.3B), M2M-100 (418M), and MarianMT (77M). To overcome hardware constraints, we employed parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques (QLoRA) and extensive data filtering using a domain-specific BERT-based classifier. Our experiments demonstrate that the presence of the target language (Bashkir) in the model's pre-training data is the decisive factor for performance. Our best system, a fine-tuned NLLB-200-1.3B model augmented with exact match retrieval, achieved a CHRF++ score of 52.67. We also report on negative results with custom tokenization for smaller models, providing insights into the limitations of vocabulary adaptation without extensive pre-training.

DevLake at LoResMT 2026: The Impact of Pre-training and Model Scale on Russian-Bashkir Low-Resource Translation

This paper describes a submission to the LoResMT 2026 Shared Task for the Russian-Kazakh, Russian-Bashkir, and English-Chuvash tracks. The primary approach involves parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA) of the Tencent HY-MT1.5-7B multilingual model. For the Russian-Kazakh and Russian-Bashkir pairs, LoRA adaptation was employed to correct the model's default Arabic script output to Cyrillic. For the extremely low-resource English-Chuvash pair, two strategies were compared: mixed training on authentic English-Chuvash and Russian-Chuvash data versus training exclusively on a synthetic English-Chuvash corpus created via pivoting through Russian. Baseline systems included NLLB 1.3B (distilled) for Russian-Kazakh and Russian-Bashkir, and Gemma 2 3B for English-Chuvash. Results demonstrate that adapting a strong multilingual backbone with LoRA yields significant improvements over baselines while successfully addressing script mismatch challenges. Code for training and inference is released at: https://github.com/defdet/low-resource-langs-mt-adapt

Script Correction and Synthetic Pivoting: Adapting Tencent HY-MT for Low-Resource Turkic Translation

We describe our submission to the Turkic languages translation challenge at LoResMT 2026, which focuses on translation from Russian into Kyrgyz. Our approach leverages parallel data, synthetic translations, a comprehensive filtering pipeline and a four-stage curriculum learning strategy. We compare our system with contemporary baselines and present the model that achieves a chrF++ score of 49.1 and takes first place in the competition.

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