@inproceedings{adebara-abdul-mageed-2021-improving, title = "Improving Similar Language Translation With Transfer Learning", author = "Adebara, Ife and Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad", booktitle = "Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation", month = nov, year = "2021", address = "Online", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.wmt-1.27", pages = "273--278", abstract = "We investigate transfer learning based on pre-trained neural machine translation models to translate between (low-resource) similar languages. This work is part of our contribution to the WMT 2021 Similar Languages Translation Shared Task where we submitted models for different language pairs, including French-Bambara, Spanish-Catalan, and Spanish-Portuguese in both directions. Our models for Catalan-Spanish (82.79 BLEU)and Portuguese-Spanish (87.11 BLEU) rank top 1 in the official shared task evaluation, and we are the only team to submit models for the French-Bambara pairs.", }