Unfragmenting Nawatl NMT: Single-Variant Specialization for Masewalkopa

The paper presents a specialized NMT model for the Masewalkopa variant of Nawatl, a low‑resource language from Mexico. Using a 70,000‑pair multi‑variant foundation, the authors curate 2,665 parallel pairs and augment them with 192 elder‑transcribed sentences via asymmetric back‑translation. A custom finite‑state analyzer reduces unanalyzed forms from 82.0% to 19.9% and supplies functional syntax tags as prefixes, enabling the model to reuse subword embeddings and achieve a dev chrF++ of 58.46 and test chrF++ scores around 58.0. The final LoRA‑v9c‑b model is quantized with CTranslate2 int8, cutting CPU latency from 137.5 to 1.8–2.6 seconds per request for cost‑bounded Cloud Run deployment.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computation and Language.

• rag
• fine-tuning
• efficiency