Rosetta Balcanica: Deriving a “Gold Standard” Neural Machine Translation (NMT) Parallel Dataset for Western Balkan Languages

The Rosetta Balcanica is an ongoing effort to expand the resources for lowresource western Balkan languages. This effort focuses on discovering and using accurately translated, officially mapped, and curated parallel language resources and their preparation and use as neural machine translation (NMT) datasets. Some of the guiding principles, practices, and methods employed by Rosetta Balcanica are generalizable and could apply to other lowresource language resource expansion efforts. With this goal in mind, we present our rationale and approach to discovering and using meticulously translated and officially curated lowresource language resources and our use of these resources to develop a parallel “gold standard” translation training resource. Secondly, we describe our specific methodology for NMT dataset development from these resources and its publication to a widelyused and accessible repository for natural language processing (Hugging Face Hub). Finally, we discuss the tradeoffs and limitations of our current approach and the roadmap for future development and expansion of the current Rosetta Balcanica language resource.