Preparing the Vuk’uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African multilingual corpora

Richard Lastrucci, Jenalea Rajab, Matimba Shingange, Daniel Njini, Vukosi Marivate


Abstract
This paper introduces two multilingual government themed corpora in various South African languages. The corpora were collected by gathering South African government speeches (ZA-gov-multilingual), as well as the South African Government newspaper (Vuk’uzenzele), that are translated into all 11 South African official languages. The corpora can be used for a myriad of downstream NLP tasks. The corpora were created to allow researchers to study the language used in South African government publications, with a focus on understanding how South African government officials communicate with their constituents. In this paper we highlight the process of gathering, cleaning and making available the corpora. We create parallel sentence corpora for Neural Machine Translation tasks using Language-Agnostic Sentence Representations (LASER) embeddings. With these aligned sentences we then provide NMT benchmarks for 9 indigenous languages by fine-tuning massively multilingual pre-trained language model.
Anthology ID:
2023.rail-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL 2023)
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Rooweither Mabuya, Don Mthobela, Mmasibidi Setaka, Menno Van Zaanen
Venue:
RAIL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18–25
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.rail-1.3
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.rail-1.3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Richard Lastrucci, Jenalea Rajab, Matimba Shingange, Daniel Njini, and Vukosi Marivate. 2023. Preparing the Vuk’uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African multilingual corpora. In Proceedings of the Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL 2023), pages 18–25, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Preparing the Vuk’uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African multilingual corpora (Lastrucci et al., RAIL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.rail-1.3.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.rail-1.3.mp4