MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages

Chris Chinenye Emezue, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou


Abstract
In this paper, we focus on the task of multilingual machine translation for African languages and describe our contribution in the 2021 WMT Shared Task: Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation. We introduce MMTAfrica, the first many-to-many multilingual translation system for six African languages: Fon (fon), Igbo (ibo), Kinyarwanda (kin), Swahili/Kiswahili (swa), Xhosa (xho), and Yoruba (yor) and two non-African languages: English (eng) and French (fra). For multilingual translation concerning African languages, we introduce a novel backtranslation and reconstruction objective, BT&REC, inspired by the random online back translation and T5 modelling framework respectively, to effectively leverage monolingual data. Additionally, we report improvements from MMTAfrica over the FLORES 101 benchmarks (spBLEU gains ranging from +0.58 in Swahili to French to +19.46 in French to Xhosa).
Anthology ID:
2021.wmt-1.48
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Loic Barrault, Ondrej Bojar, Fethi Bougares, Rajen Chatterjee, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Alexander Fraser, Markus Freitag, Yvette Graham, Roman Grundkiewicz, Paco Guzman, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, Tom Kocmi, Andre Martins, Makoto Morishita, Christof Monz
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
398–411
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wmt-1.48
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chris Chinenye Emezue and Bonaventure F. P. Dossou. 2021. MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages. In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 398–411, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages (Emezue & Dossou, WMT 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wmt-1.48.pdf
Code
 edaiofficial/mmtafrica