Enabling Medical Translation for Low-Resource Languages

10/09/2016

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by   Ahmad Musleh, et al.

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We present research towards bridging the language gap between migrant workers in Qatar and medical staff. In particular, we present the first steps towards the development of a real-world Hindi-English machine translation system for doctor-patient communication. As this is a low-resource language pair, especially for speech and for the medical domain, our initial focus has been on gathering suitable training data from various sources. We applied a variety of methods ranging from fully automatic extraction from the Web to manual annotation of test data. Moreover, we developed a method for automatically augmenting the training data with synthetically generated variants, which yielded a very sizable improvement of more than 3 BLEU points absolute.