Charles Translator: A Machine Translation System between Ukrainian and Czech
Martin Popel, Lucie Polakova, Michal Novák, Jindřich Helcl, Jindřich Libovický, Pavel Straňák, Tomas Krabac, Jaroslava Hlavacova
Abstract
We present Charles Translator, a machine translation system between Ukrainian and Czech, developed as part of a society-wide effort to mitigate the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war on individuals and society. The system was developed in the spring of 2022 with the help of many language data providers in order to quickly meet the demand for such a service, which was not available at the time in the required quality. The translator was later implemented as an online web interface and as an Android app with speech input, both featuring Cyrillic-Latin script transliteration. The system translates directly, in comparison to other available systems that use English as a pivot, and thus makes advantage of the typological similarity of the two languages. It uses the block back-translation method which allows for efficient use of monolingual training data. The paper describes the development process including data collection and implementation, evaluation, mentions several use cases and outlines possibilities for further development of the system for educational purposes.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{popel-etal-2024-charles,
title = "{C}harles Translator: A Machine Translation System between {U}krainian and {C}zech",
author = "Popel, Martin and
Polakova, Lucie and
Nov{\'a}k, Michal and
Helcl, Jind{\v{r}}ich and
Libovick{\'y}, Jind{\v{r}}ich and
Stra{\v{n}}{\'a}k, Pavel and
Krabac, Tomas and
Hlavacova, Jaroslava and
Anisimova, Mariia and
Chlanova, Tereza",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Kan, Min-Yen and
Hoste, Veronique and
Lenci, Alessandro and
Sakti, Sakriani and
Xue, Nianwen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
month = may,
year = "2024",
address = "Torino, Italia",
publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.271/",
pages = "3038--3045"
}