Advancements in Neural Machine Translation: Methodological Innovations and Empirical Insights for Cross-Linguistic Discourse Preservation

Abstract: Natural Language Processing (NLP), in the form recognizable today, really began to take hold in the 1980s, when machine learning helped propel it to soaring heights. However, due to a lack of processing power, machine learning, and to an extent, NLP, started slowing down in innovation and ideas and had almost ground to a relative halt, until the last decade, when a sudden increase in both productivity and interest in the machine learning helped increase the amount of knowledge in the space itself. This review provides several different case studies using different methodologies. The first paper was a deep analysis on how researchers were able to use Tesseract and Google Vision in tandem with automatic data mining methods to enrich the Cherokee language database in order to preserve it from extinction. The second paper takes a query translation-based approach toward translating English to Indian languages and utilizes a Multilingual Cross-Language Information Retrieval (MLCIR) system with tools such as Part of Speech Tagger (POST), Stop-Word, and Porter Stemmer. The third paper presents CoVe, which transfers knowledge from machine translation to improve performance on NLP tasks like sentiment analysis and question answering by using contextualized word vectors along with word embeddings, achieving new state-of-the-art results on some datasets. The fourth paper aims to translate English to Pakistan Sign Language (PSL) and also uses POST and goes through dependency analysis, sentence classification, and PSL using PLS trees. The fifth paper uses a Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system for LowResource languages and incorporates two main models: a recurrent NMT and a transformer NMT. The sixth paper analyzes how a fine-tuned transformer model seems to work better than transformer models trained from scratch on high-resource languages, while vice-versa seems to occur for low-resource languages. The seventh paper adds to this by talking about how multilingual translation seems to work better than a back-translation model. Given the diverse array of approaches that could be used, we aim to identify the most efficient and correct methodology for future researchers to use in their work, based on the papers in this literature review.