Kreyòl-MT: Building MT for Latin American, Caribbean and Colonial African Creole Languages

Nathaniel Robinson, Raj Dabre, Ammon Shurtz, Rasul Dent, Onenamiyi Onesi, Claire Monroc, Loïc Grobol, Hasan Muhammad, Ashi Garg, Naome Etori, Vijay Murari Tiyyala, Olanrewaju Samuel, Matthew Stutzman, Bismarck Odoom, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Stephen Richardson, Kenton Murray


Abstract
A majority of language technologies are tailored for a small number of high-resource languages, while relatively many low-resource languages are neglected. One such group, Creole languages, have long been marginalized in academic study, though their speakers could benefit from machine translation (MT). These languages are predominantly used in much of Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. We present the largest cumulative dataset to date for Creole language MT, including 14.5M unique Creole sentences with parallel translations—11.6M of which we release publicly, and the largest bitexts gathered to date for 41 languages—the first ever for 21. In addition, we provide MT models supporting all 41 Creole languages in 172 translation directions. Given our diverse dataset, we produce a model for Creole language MT exposed to more genre diversity then ever before, which outperforms a genre-specific Creole MT model on its own benchmark for 23 of 34 translation directions.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.170
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3083–3110
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.170
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Nathaniel Robinson, Raj Dabre, Ammon Shurtz, Rasul Dent, Onenamiyi Onesi, Claire Monroc, Loïc Grobol, Hasan Muhammad, Ashi Garg, Naome Etori, Vijay Murari Tiyyala, Olanrewaju Samuel, Matthew Stutzman, Bismarck Odoom, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Stephen Richardson, and Kenton Murray. 2024. Kreyòl-MT: Building MT for Latin American, Caribbean and Colonial African Creole Languages. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3083–3110, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Kreyòl-MT: Building MT for Latin American, Caribbean and Colonial African Creole Languages (Robinson et al., NAACL 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.170.pdf
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 2024.naacl-long.170.copyright.pdf