WebCrawl African : A Multilingual Parallel Corpora for African Languages

Pavanpankaj Vegi, Sivabhavani J, Biswajit Paul, Abhinav Mishra, Prashant Banjare, Prasanna K R, Chitra Viswanathan


Abstract
WebCrawl African is a mixed domain multilingual parallel corpora for a pool of African languages compiled by ANVITA machine translation team of Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Lab, primarily for accelerating research on low-resource and extremely low-resource machine translation and is part of the submission to WMT 2022 shared task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages under the data track. The corpora is compiled through web data mining and comprises 695K parallel sentences spanning 74 different language pairs from English and 15 African languages, many of which fall under low and extremely low resource categories. As a measure of corpora usefulness, a MNMT model for 24 African languages to English is trained by combining WebCrawl African corpora with existing corpus and evaluation on FLORES200 shows that inclusion of WebCrawl African corpora could improve BLEU score by 0.01-1.66 for 12 out of 15 African to English translation directions and even by 0.18-0.68 for the 4 out of 9 African to English translation directions which are not part of WebCrawl African corpora. WebCrawl African corpora includes more parallel sentences for many language pairs in comparison to OPUS public repository. This data description paper captures creation of corpora and results obtained along with datasheets. The WebCrawl African corpora is hosted on github repository.
Anthology ID:
2022.wmt-1.105
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Philipp Koehn, Loïc Barrault, Ondřej Bojar, Fethi Bougares, Rajen Chatterjee, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Alexander Fraser, Markus Freitag, Yvette Graham, Roman Grundkiewicz, Paco Guzman, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Tom Kocmi, André Martins, Makoto Morishita, Christof Monz, Masaaki Nagata, Toshiaki Nakazawa, Matteo Negri, Aurélie Névéol, Mariana Neves, Martin Popel, Marco Turchi, Marcos Zampieri
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1076–1089
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wmt-1.105
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pavanpankaj Vegi, Sivabhavani J, Biswajit Paul, Abhinav Mishra, Prashant Banjare, Prasanna K R, and Chitra Viswanathan. 2022. WebCrawl African : A Multilingual Parallel Corpora for African Languages. In Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT), pages 1076–1089, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
WebCrawl African : A Multilingual Parallel Corpora for African Languages (Vegi et al., WMT 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2022.wmt-1.105.pdf