Abstract

The present paper enumerates the development of Panlingua-KMI Machine Translation (MT) systems for Hindi ↔ Nepali language pair, designed as part of the Similar Language Translation Task at the WMT 2019 Shared Task. The Panlingua-KMI team conducted a series of experiments to explore both the phrase-based statistical (PBSMT) and neural methods (NMT). Among the 11 MT systems prepared under this task, 6 PBSMT systems were prepared for Nepali-Hindi, 1 PBSMT for Hindi-Nepali and 2 NMT systems were developed for Nepali↔Hindi. The results show that PBSMT could be an effective method for developing MT systems for closely-related languages. Our Hindi-Nepali PBSMT system was ranked 2nd among the 13 systems submitted for the pair and our Nepali-Hindi PBSMTsystem was ranked 4th among the 12 systems submitted for the task.