Filling the Gap for Uzbek: Creating Translation Resources for Southern Uzbek

2025/08/20 by Mukhammadsaid Mamasaidov, Azizullah Aral, Mamasaidov, Mukhammadsaid +5
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Central Asia Education and Culture #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Economic and Industrial Development #Education, Innovation and Language Studies #FOS: Computer and information sciences

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.14586

openalex publication_date 2025/08/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/16 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Southern Uzbek (uzs) is a Turkic language variety spoken by around 5 million people in Afghanistan and differs significantly from Northern Uzbek (uzn) in phonology, lexicon, and orthography. Despite the large number of speakers, Southern Uzbek is underrepresented in natural language processing. We present new resources for Southern Uzbek machine translation, including a 997-sentence FLORES+ dev set, 39,994 parallel sentences from dictionary, literary, and web sources, and a fine-tuned NLLB-200 model (lutfiy). We also propose a post-processing method for restoring Arabic-script half-space characters, which improves handling of morphological boundaries. All datasets, models, and tools are released publicly to support future work on Southern Uzbek and other low-resource languages.

Citations

• MADLAD-400: A Multilingual And Document-Level Large Audited Dataset
• The first neural machine translation system for the Erzya language
• No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation
• Joint Persian Word Segmentation Correction and Zero-Width Non-Joiner Recognition Using BERT
• Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding
• SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing
• Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost

Related

• UzbekTagger: The rule-based POS tagger for Uzbek language
• Recent Advancements and Challenges of Turkic Central Asian Language Processing
• KyrgyzNLP: Challenges, Progress, and Future
• Tailoring mt5 for the Uzbek Language: a Compact Model for NLP Applications
• Enhancing Language Learning through Technology: Introducing a New English-Azerbaijani (Arabic Script) Parallel Corpus