Findings of the LoResMT 2020 Shared Task on Zero-Shot for Low-Resource languages

This paper presents the findings of the LoResMT 2020 Shared Task on zero-shot translation for low resource languages. This task was organised as part of the 3rd Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT) at AACL-IJCNLP 2020. The focus was on the zero-shot approach as a notable development in Neural Machine Translation to build MT systems for language pairs where parallel corpora are small or even non-existent. The shared task experience suggests that back-translation and domain adaptation methods result in better accuracy for small-size datasets. We further noted that, although translation between similar languages is no cakewalk, linguistically distinct languages require more data to give better results.