Zero-shot North Korean to English Neural Machine Translation by Character Tokenization and Phoneme Decomposition

Abstract

The primary limitation of North Korean to English translation is the lack of a parallel corpus; therefore, high translation accuracy cannot be achieved. To address this problem, we propose a zero-shot approach using South Korean data, which are remarkably similar to North Korean data. We train a neural machine translation model after tokenizing a South Korean text at the character level and decomposing characters into phonemes.We demonstrate that our method can effectively learn North Korean to English translation and improve the BLEU scores by +1.01 points in comparison with the baseline.

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Reproductions