Mohamed Aymane Farhi
2025
Correcting the Tamazight Portions of FLORES+ and OLDI Seed Datasets
Alp Oktem
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Mohamed Aymane Farhi
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Brahim Essaidi
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Naceur Jabouja
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Farida Boudichat
Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation
We present the manual correction of the Tamazight portions of the FLORES+ and OLDI Seed datasets to improve the quality of open machine translation resources for the language. These widely used reference corpora contained numerous issues, including mistranslations, orthographic inconsistencies, overuse of loanwords, and non-standard transliterations. Overall, 36% of FLORES+ and 40% of Seed sentences were corrected by expert linguists, with average token divergence of 19% and 25% among changed items. Evaluation of multiple MT systems, including NLLB models and commercial LLM services, showed consistent gains in automated evaluation metrics when using the corrected data. Fine-tuning NLLB-600M on the revised Seed corpus yielded improvements of +6.05 chrF (en→zgh) and +2.32 (zgh→en), outperforming larger parameter models and LLM providers in en→zgh direction.