Prompsit’s Submission to the IWSLT 2018 Low Resource Machine Translation Task

This paper presents Prompsit Language Engineering’s submission to the IWSLT 2018 Low Resource Machine Translation task. Our submission is based on cross-lingual learning: a multilingual neural machine translation system was created with the sole purpose of improving translation quality on the Basque-to-English language pair. The multilingual system was trained on a combination of in-domain data, pseudo in-domain data obtained via cross-entropy data selection and backtranslated data. We morphologically segmented Basque text with a novel approach that only requires a dictionary such as those used by spell checkers and proved that this segmentation approach outperforms the widespread byte pair encoding strategy for this task.