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Raphaël Merx
@rapha.dev

Our paper on who uses tetun.org, and what for, got published at the LoResMT 2025 workshop! An emotional paper for me, going back to the project that got me into a machine learning PhD in the first place.

Raphaël Merx
@rapha.dev

We find that (1) a LOT of usage is for educational purposes (>50% of translated text) --> contrasts sharply with Tetun corpora (e.g. MADLAD), dominated by news & religion. Takeaway: don't evaluate MT on overrepresented domains (e.g. religion)! You risk misrepresenting end-user exp.

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Raphaël Merx
@rapha.dev

(2) Translation into Tetun is in higher demand (by >2x) than translation from Tetun Takeaway for us MT folks: focus on translation into low-res langs, harder but more impactful

Raphaël Merx
@rapha.dev

(3) The vast majority of usage is on mobile (over 90% of users / over 80k devices) Takeaway: publishing MT model in mobile apps is probably more impactful than setting up a website / HuggingFace space.

Raphaël Merx
@rapha.dev

Many thanks to Adérito Correia (Timor-Leste INL), and my supervisors Hanna Suominen Katerina Vylomova! Paper at aclanthology.org/2025.loresmt... , video presentation at youtu.be/8zenieJWRyg

aclanthology.orgLow-resource Machine Translation: what for? who for? An observational study on a dedicated Tetun language translation serviceRaphael Merx, Adérito José Guterres Correia, Hanna Suominen, Ekaterina Vylomova. Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2025). 20...