The Constitution Speaks Nheengatu: An Open MT System and Reproducible Corpus Pipeline for the Amazonian Língua Geral

Key points

• Nheengatu (yrl), the Amazonian Língua Geral, has 6--10 thousand speakers and is co-official in São Gabriel da Cachoeira (Brazil), yet remains poorly served by evaluated Portuguese--Nheengatu MT resources.1
• Second, a corpus expansion that adds transcribed conversation raises speech chrF++ by 24--27 points while leaving written domains unchanged, a register gap that written-only benchmarks cannot see.1
• Third, a larger NLLB model helps translation into Portuguese but not into Nheengatu on legal or speech text.1
• For Portuguese-to-Nheengatu translation, our final systems reach 31.7--32.8 chrF++ on article-disjoint constitutional text, 64.1--64.5 on the near-domain set (62.1 after removing items with target-side content overlap), and 45.2--47.5 on speech.1

Sources (1)

• [1]The Constitution Speaks Nheengatu: An Open MT System and Reproducible Corpus Pipeline for the Amazonian Língua Geral
  arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 10, 09:32 AM

  We present the largest parallel corpus assembled for the language (14.5k Portuguese--Nheengatu pairs), anchored by the 2023 official translation of the Brazilian Federal Constitution; the first MT evaluation set built from transcribed spontaneous speech; and, to our knowledge, the first open-weight MT models dedicated to bidirectional Portuguese--Nheengatu translation.

  Nheengatu (yrl), the Amazonian Língua Geral, has 6--10 thousand speakers and is co-official in São Gabriel da Cachoeira (Brazil), yet remains poorly served by evaluated Portuguese--Nheengatu MT resources.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.