Homophone normalization–where characters that have the same sound in a writing script are mapped to one character–is a pre-processing step applied in Amharic Natural Language Processing (NLP) literature. While this may improve performance reported by automatic metrics, it also results in models that are unable to effectively process different forms of writing in a single language. Further, there might be impacts in transfer learning, where models trained on normalized data do not generalize well to other languages. In this paper, we experiment with monolingual training and cross-lingual transfer to understand the impacts of normalization on languages that use the Ge’ez script. We then propose a post-inference intervention in which normalization is applied to model predictions instead of training data. With our simple scheme of post-inference normalization, we show that we can achieve an increase in BLEU score of up to 1.03 while preserving language features in training.

African languages are not well-represented in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The main reason is a lack of resources for training models. Low-resource languages, such as Amharic and Ge’ez, cannot benefit from modern NLP methods because of the lack of high-quality datasets. This paper presents AGE, an open-source tripartite alignment of Amharic, Ge’ez, and English parallel dataset. Additionally, we introduced a novel, 1,000 Ge’ez-centered sentences sourced from areas such as news and novels. Furthermore, we developed a model from a multilingual pre-trained language model, which brings 12.29 and 30.66 for English-Ge’ez and Ge’ez to English, respectively, and 9.39 and 12.29 for Amharic-Ge’ez and Ge’ez-Amharic respectively.