Machine Translation for Nko: Tools, Corpora, and Baseline Results

Moussa Doumbouya, Baba Mamadi Diané, Solo Farabado Cissé, Djibrila Diané, Abdoulaye Sow, Séré Moussa Doumbouya, Daouda Bangoura, Fodé Moriba Bayo, Ibrahima Sory Conde, Kalo Mory Diané, Chris Piech, Christopher Manning


Abstract
Currently, there is no usable machine translation system for Nko, a language spoken by tens of millions of people across multiple West African countries, which holds significant cultural and educational value. To address this issue, we present a set of tools, resources, and baseline results aimed towards the development of usable machine translation systems for Nko and other languages that do not currently have sufficiently large parallel text corpora available. (1) Friael: A novel collaborative parallel text curation software that incorporates quality control through copyedit-based workflows. (2) Expansion of the FLoRes-200 and NLLB-Seed corpora with 2,009 and 6,193 high-quality Nko translations in parallel with 204 and 40 other languages. (3) nicolingua-0005: A collection of trilingual and bilingual corpora with 130,850 parallel segments and monolingual corpora containing over 3 million Nko words. (4) Baseline bilingual and multilingual neural machine translation results with the best model scoring 30.83 English-Nko chrF++ on FLoRes-devtest.
Anthology ID:
2023.wmt-1.34
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Philipp Koehn, Barry Haddow, Tom Kocmi, Christof Monz
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
312–343
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wmt-1.34
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wmt-1.34
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Moussa Doumbouya, Baba Mamadi Diané, Solo Farabado Cissé, Djibrila Diané, Abdoulaye Sow, Séré Moussa Doumbouya, Daouda Bangoura, Fodé Moriba Bayo, Ibrahima Sory Conde, Kalo Mory Diané, Chris Piech, and Christopher Manning. 2023. Machine Translation for Nko: Tools, Corpora, and Baseline Results. In Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 312–343, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Machine Translation for Nko: Tools, Corpora, and Baseline Results (Doumbouya et al., WMT 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wmt-1.34.pdf