PARME: Parallel Corpora for Low-Resourced Middle Eastern Languages
Sina Ahmadi, Rico Sennrich, Erfan Karami, Ako Marani, Parviz Fekrazad, Gholamreza Akbarzadeh Baghban, Hanah Hadi, Semko Heidari
Abstract
The Middle East is characterized by remarkable linguistic diversity, with over 400 million inhabitants speaking more than 60 languages across multiple language families. This study presents a pioneering work in developing the first parallel corpora for eight severely under-resourced varieties in the region–PARME, addressing fundamental challenges in low-resource scenarios including non-standardized writing and dialectal complexity. Through an extensive community-driven initiative, volunteers contributed to the creation of over 36,000 translated sentences, marking a significant milestone in resource development. We evaluate machine translation capabilities through zero-shot approaches and fine-tuning experiments with pretrained machine translation models and provide a comprehensive analysis of limitations. Our findings reveal significant gaps in existing technologies for processing the selected languages, highlighting critical areas for improvement in language technology for Middle Eastern languages.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ahmadi-etal-2025-parme,
title = "{PARME}: Parallel Corpora for Low-Resourced {M}iddle {E}astern Languages",
author = {Ahmadi, Sina and
Sennrich, Rico and
Karami, Erfan and
Marani, Ako and
Fekrazad, Parviz and
Baghban, Gholamreza Akbarzadeh and
Hadi, Hanah and
Heidari, Semko and
Dogan, Mah{\^i}r and
Asadi, Pedram and
Bashir, Dashne and
Ghodrati, Mohammad Amin and
Amini, Kourosh and
Ashourinezhad, Zeynab and
Baladi, Mana and
Ezzati, Farshid and
Ghasemifar, Alireza and
Hosseinpour, Daryoush and
Abbaszadeh, Behrooz and
Hassanpour, Amin and
Hamaamin, Bahaddin Jalal and
Hama, Saya Kamal and
Mousavi, Ardeshir and
Hussein, Sarko Nazir and
Nejadgholi, Isar and
{\"O}lmez, Mehmet and
Osmanpour, Horam and
Ramezani, Rashid Roshan and
Aziz, Aryan Sediq and
Salehi Sheikhalikelayeh, Ali and
Yadegari, Mohammadreza and
Yadegari, Kewyar and
Roodsari, Sedighe Zamani},
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1451/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1451",
pages = "30032--30053",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}