<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="yamoah-etal-2025-building">
    <titleInfo>
        <title>Building a Functional Machine Translation Corpus for Kpelle</title>
    </titleInfo>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Kweku</namePart>
        <namePart type="given">Andoh</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Yamoah</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Jackson</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Weako</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Emmanuel</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Dorley</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2025-07</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on African Natural Language Processing (AfricaNLP 2025)</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Constantine</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Lignos</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Idris</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Abdulmumin</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">David</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Adelani</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <originInfo>
            <publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
            <place>
                <placeTerm type="text">Vienna, Austria</placeTerm>
            </place>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
        <identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-257-2</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <abstract>In this paper, we introduce the first publicly available English-Kpelle dataset for machine translation, comprising over 2,000 sentence pairs drawn from everyday communication, religious texts, and educational materials. By fine-tuning Metas No Language Left Behind (NLLB) model on two versions of the dataset, we achieved BLEU scores of up to 30 in the Kpelle-to-English direction, demonstrating the benefits of data augmentation. Our findings align with NLLB-200 benchmarks on other African languages, underscoring Kpelles potential for competitive performance despite its low-resource status. Beyond machine translation, this dataset enables broader NLP tasks, including speech recognition and language modeling. We conclude with a roadmap for future dataset expansion, emphasizing orthographic consistency, community-driven validation, and interdisciplinary collaboration to advance inclusive language technology development for Kpelle and other low-resourced Mande languages.</abstract>
    <identifier type="citekey">yamoah-etal-2025-building</identifier>
    <identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2025.africanlp-1.8</identifier>
    <location>
        <url>https://aclanthology.org/2025.africanlp-1.8/</url>
    </location>
    <part>
        <date>2025-07</date>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>52</start>
            <end>63</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>

%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Building a Functional Machine Translation Corpus for Kpelle
%A Yamoah, Kweku Andoh
%A Weako, Jackson
%A Dorley, Emmanuel
%Y Lignos, Constantine
%Y Abdulmumin, Idris
%Y Adelani, David
%S Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on African Natural Language Processing (AfricaNLP 2025)
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-257-2
%F yamoah-etal-2025-building
%X In this paper, we introduce the first publicly available English-Kpelle dataset for machine translation, comprising over 2,000 sentence pairs drawn from everyday communication, religious texts, and educational materials. By fine-tuning Metas No Language Left Behind (NLLB) model on two versions of the dataset, we achieved BLEU scores of up to 30 in the Kpelle-to-English direction, demonstrating the benefits of data augmentation. Our findings align with NLLB-200 benchmarks on other African languages, underscoring Kpelles potential for competitive performance despite its low-resource status. Beyond machine translation, this dataset enables broader NLP tasks, including speech recognition and language modeling. We conclude with a roadmap for future dataset expansion, emphasizing orthographic consistency, community-driven validation, and interdisciplinary collaboration to advance inclusive language technology development for Kpelle and other low-resourced Mande languages.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.africanlp-1.8
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.africanlp-1.8/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.africanlp-1.8
%P 52-63

Markdown (Informal)

[Building a Functional Machine Translation Corpus for Kpelle](https://aclanthology.org/2025.africanlp-1.8/) (Yamoah et al., AfricaNLP 2025)

• Building a Functional Machine Translation Corpus for Kpelle (Yamoah et al., AfricaNLP 2025)

ACL

• Kweku Andoh Yamoah, Jackson Weako, and Emmanuel Dorley. 2025. Building a Functional Machine Translation Corpus for Kpelle. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on African Natural Language Processing (AfricaNLP 2025), pages 52–63, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.