Igbo-English Machine Translation: An Evaluation Benchmark

By I. Ezeani, Paul Rayson, I. Onyenwe, C. Uchechukwu, Mark Hepple. 2020

27 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although researchers and practitioners are pushing the boundaries and enhancing the capacities of NLP tools and methods, works on African languages are lagging. A lot of focus on well resourced languages such as English, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Mandarin Chinese etc. Over 97% of the world's 7000 languages, including African languages, are low resourced for NLP i.e. they have little or no data, tools, and techniques for NLP research. For instance, only 5 out of 2965, 0.19% authors of full text papers in the ACL Anthology extracted from the 5 major conferences in 2018 ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, COLING and CoNLL, are affiliated to African institutions. In this work, we discuss our effort toward building a standard machine translation benchmark dataset for Igbo, one of the 3 major Nigerian languages. Igbo is spoken by more than 50 million people globally with over 50% of the speakers are in southeastern Nigeria. Igbo is low resourced although there have been some efforts toward developing IgboNLP such as part of speech tagging and diacritic restoration

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Language and Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Evaluation & Benchmarks

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Citations in the corpus

Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation (2020, methodology): “, 2020), Fon (Emezue and Dossou, 2020), Igbo (Ezeani et al., 2020), Amharic, Tigrigna, Afan-Oromo, Wolaytta, and Ge’ez (Abate et al.”
The Flores-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation (2021, background): “, 2020), as well as datasets for specific languages such as Igbo (Ezeani et al., 2020) and Fon (Dossou and Emezue, 2020).”
Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languages (2022, background): “Participation is especially strong from the African continent, including corpora and models for pan East-African languages (Babirye et al., 2022), languages from the Horn of Africa (Hadgu et al., 2022), Ethiopian languages (Abate et al., 2018; Gezmu et al., 2021), Ugandan languages (Akera et al., 20”