Biomedical Machine Translation for Low-Resource Arabic-Script Languages via Cross-Lingual Transfer and LoRA Adapter Merging
We present a systematic study of healthcare-domain cross-lingual transfer to address the scarcity of biomedical NMT resources for Arabic-script languages. We use Arabic and Persian as higher-resource pivots to improve translation for \textbf{four severely low-resource} targets: Dari (Afghan Persian, a standardised variety of Persian), Pashto, Sorani Kurdish (Central Kurdish, a major standardized variety of Kurdish), and Urdu (closely related to Hindi). Using LoRA fine-tuning on small decoder-only LLMs, we train \textit{domain-specific pivot adapters} and evaluate \textbf{three transfer strategies}: few-shot in-context learning, minimal supervised adaptation, and, to the best of our knowle...
| Authors | Abdullah Alabdullah, Arash Eslamighayour, Sarp Harbalioglu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 July 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.