Datasets:

openlanguagedata
/

oldi_seed

@inproceedings{jumashev-etal-2025-kyrgyz,
    title = "The {K}yrgyz Seed Dataset Submission to the {WMT}25 Open Language Data Initiative Shared Task",
    author = "Jumashev, Murat  and
      Tillabaeva, Alina  and
      Kasieva, Aida  and
      Omurkanov, Turgunbek  and
      Musaeva, Akylai  and
      Emil Kyzy, Meerim  and
      Chagataeva, Gulaiym  and
      Washington, Jonathan",
    editor = "Haddow, Barry  and
      Kocmi, Tom  and
      Koehn, Philipp  and
      Monz, Christof",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.wmt-1.84/",
    pages = "1088--1102",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-341-8",
    abstract = "We present a Kyrgyz language seed dataset as part of our contribution to the WMT25 Open Language Data Initiative (OLDI) shared task. This paper details the process of collecting and curating English{--}Kyrgyz translations, highlighting the main challenges encountered in translating into a morphologically rich, low-resource language. We demonstrate the quality of the dataset through fine-tuning experiments, showing consistent improvements in machine translation performance across multiple models. Comparisons with bilingual and MNMT Kyrgyz-English baselines reveal that, for some models, our dataset enables performance surpassing pretrained baselines in both English{--}Kyrgyz and Kyrgyz{--}English translation directions. These results validate the dataset{'}s utility and suggest that it can serve as a valuable resource for the Kyrgyz MT community and other related low-resource languages."
}

See the paper "The Kyrgyz Seed Dataset Submission to the WMT25 Open Language Data Initiative Shared Task" at https://aclanthology.org/2025.wmt-1.84/.

Language codes

ISO 639-3: kir
ISO 15924: Cyrl
Glottocode: kirg1245

Additional language information

We used el-sozduk.kg, which provides multiple dictionaries including Kyrgyz-English, Kyrgyz-Russian, English-Kyrgyz, and Russian-Kyrgyz. Since Kazakh and Kyrgyz are highly mutually intelligible, we also consulted sozdik.kz (a Kazakh dictionary) to assist with translations and cross-checking. In addition, we used other English-to-Turkic language dictionaries to further inform our translations. Russian was frequently used as an intermediary language, both for dictionary lookups (e.g., via multitran.com for English-Russian) and for clarifying meanings between English and Kyrgyz or other Turkic languages.

Workflow

Our translation team included six native Kyrgyz speakers: two experienced translators and two students from the Kyrgyz-English Language Program at Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University. We followed the OLDI (2025) guidelines. The workflow had four stages: (1) machine translation using Aitil (https://translate.mamtil.gov.kg/), a Gemma3-based MT service fine-tuned by Ulut Soft LLC, (2) manual correction by individual translators, (3) team terminology unification, and (4) cross-validation and peer review to ensure accuracy and consistency.

Additional guidelines

We created a supplementary list of terms—an English-to-Kyrgyz mini-dictionary—for words and expressions that could not be found in any existing English-Kyrgyz or Russian-Kyrgyz dictionaries. This resource is available in the paper's repository: https://github.com/kyrgyz-nlp/oldi-dataset-experiments/blob/main/mini-dictionary.txt

Terminology consultation and review were led by one of the co-authors, Assoc. Prof.Dr. Aida Kasieva, Department of Simultaneous Translation, Faculty of Humanities of the Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University. Her expertise ensured the accuracy and consistency of specialized vocabulary throughout the dataset.