task_categories:text2text-generation task_categories:translation annotations_creators:expert-generated language_creators:expert-generated multilinguality:translation size_categories:unknown source_datasets:original language:en language:liv license:cc-by-nc-sa-4.0 conditional-text-generation region:us
Livonian is one of the most endangered languages in Europe with just a tiny handful of speakers and virtually no publicly available corpora. 
In this paper we tackle the task of developing neural machine translation (NMT) between Livonian and English, with a two-fold aim: on one hand, 
preserving the language and on the other – enabling access to Livonian folklore, lifestories and other textual intangible heritage as well as 
making it easier to create further parallel corpora. We rely on Livonian's linguistic similarity to Estonian and Latvian and collect parallel 
and monolingual data for the four languages for translation experiments. We combine different low-resource NMT techniques like zero-shot translation, 
cross-lingual transfer and synthetic data creation to reach the highest possible translation quality as well as to find which base languages are 
empirically more helpful for transfer to Livonian. The resulting NMT systems and the collected monolingual and parallel data, including a manually 
translated and verified translation benchmark, are publicly released.

Fields:
- source: source of the data
- en: sentence in English
- liv: sentence in Livonian
@inproceedings{rikters-etal-2022,
    title = "Machine Translation for Livonian: Catering for 20 Speakers",
    author = "Rikters, Matīss  and
      Tomingas, Marili and
      Tuisk, Tuuli and
      Valts, Ernštreits  and
      Fishel, Mark",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of ACL 2022",
    year = "2022",
    address = "Dublin, Ireland",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics"
}
---
annotations_creators:
- expert-generated
language_creators:
- expert-generated
language:
- en
- liv
license:
- cc-by-nc-sa-4.0
multilinguality:
- translation
size_categories:
- unknown
source_datasets:
- original
task_categories:
- text2text-generation
- translation
task_ids: []
pretty_name: Liv4ever
language_bcp47:
- en-US
- liv
tags:
- conditional-text-generation
---

# liv4ever v1

This is the Livonian 4-lingual parallel corpus. Livonian is a Uralic / Finnic language with just about 20 fluent speakers and no native speakers (as of 2021). The texts and translations in this corpus were collected from all the digital text resources that could be found by the authors; scanned and printed materials are left for future work.

The corpus includes parallel data for Livonian-Latvian, Livonian-Estonian and Livonian-English; the data has been collected in 2021. After retrieval it was normalized in terms of different orthographies of Livonian and manually sentence-aligned where needed. It was collected from the following sources, with sentence counts per language pair:

* Dictionary - example sentences from the Livonian-Latvian-Estonian dictionary;
  * liv-lv: 10'388, 
  * liv-et: 10'378
* Stalte - the alphabet book by Kōrli Stalte, translated into Estonian and Latvian;
  * liv-lv: 842, 
  * liv-et: 685
* Poetry - the poetry collection book "Ma võtan su õnge, tursk / Ma akūb sīnda vizzõ, tūrska", with Estonian translations;
  * liv-et: 770
* Vääri - the book by Eduard Vääri about Livonian language and culture;
  * liv-et: 592
* Satversme - translations of the Latvian Constitution into Livonian, Estonian and English;
  * liv-en: 380, 
  * liv-lv: 414, 
  * liv-et: 413
* Facebook - social media posts by the Livonian Institute and Livonian Days with original translations;
  * liv-en: 123, 
  * liv-lv: 124, 
  * liv-et: 7
* JEFUL - article abstracts from the Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics, special issues dedicated to Livonian studies, translated into Estonian and English;
  * liv-en: 36, 
  * liv-et: 49
* Trilium - the book with a collection of Livonian poetry, foreword and afterword translated into Estonian and Latvian;
  * liv-lv: 51, 
  * liv-et: 53
* Songs - material crawled off lyricstranslate.com;
  * liv-en: 54, 
  * liv-lv: 54, 
  * liv-fr: 31