Sigit Purnomo

Sigit Purnomo

Senior Lecturer at Informatics Department, Universitas Atma Jaya Yogyakarta

Bidirectional Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Between Regional Languages and Indonesian with the Transformer Model

1 minute read

This article was published in Jurnal Buana Informatika, Volume 17, Number 2 (October 2026), published by Universitas Atma Jaya Yogyakarta.

Authors: Frendy, Yohanes Sigit Purnomo Wulyo Putro, Martinus Maslim

Language: English (article title and English abstract; the journal page also provides an Indonesian abstract)

Abstract:
The limited digital linguistic resources for Indonesian regional languages remain a major obstacle to developing high-quality automatic translation systems. This study presents an empirical comparison of three multilingual Transformer based Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, mT5, ByT5, and NLLB, for bidirectional translation between five Indonesian regional languages (Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Minangkabau, and Dayak Maanyan) and Indonesian under low-resource conditions. Using approximately 4,000 sentence pairs per language, the three models were evaluated with BLEU and ChrF++. Results show the bilingual baseline consistently outperformed the bidirectional multilingual approach across all three architectures, with NLLB proving most resilient to this degradation and achieving the strongest overall result (BLEU 62.16, ChrF++ 79.93) in controlled, domain-specific settings. This study contributes preliminary empirical evidence on architecture selection for low-resource regional language translation, constrained by dataset size and the absence of human evaluation.

Keywords: Machine Translation, Multilingual, Neural Machine Translation, Regional Languages, Transformer, Bahasa Daerah

Journal: Jurnal Buana Informatika

Volume/Issue: 17(2), October 2026

Publication Date: October 30, 2026

Publisher: Universitas Atma Jaya Yogyakarta

DOI: 10.24002/jbi.v17i2.15344

Article URL: https://ojs.uajy.ac.id/index.php/jbi/article/view/15344

How to Cite

If you extend or use this work, please cite the paper where it was introduced:

@article{Frendy2026Bidirectional,
    author = {Frendy and Purnomo Wulyo Putro, Yohanes Sigit and Maslim, Martinus},
    title = {Bidirectional Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Between Regional Languages and Indonesian with the Transformer Model},
    journal = {Jurnal Buana Informatika},
    volume = {17},
    number = {2},
    year = {2026},
    publisher = {Universitas Atma Jaya Yogyakarta},
    doi = {10.24002/jbi.v17i2.15344},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.24002/jbi.v17i2.15344}
}

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