@inproceedings{emezue-dossou-2021-mmtafrica,
    title = "{MMTA}frica: Multilingual Machine Translation for {A}frican Languages",
    author = "Emezue, Chris Chinenye  and
      Dossou, Bonaventure F. P.",
    editor = "Barrault, Loic  and
      Bojar, Ondrej  and
      Bougares, Fethi  and
      Chatterjee, Rajen  and
      Costa-jussa, Marta R.  and
      Federmann, Christian  and
      Fishel, Mark  and
      Fraser, Alexander  and
      Freitag, Markus  and
      Graham, Yvette  and
      Grundkiewicz, Roman  and
      Guzman, Paco  and
      Haddow, Barry  and
      Huck, Matthias  and
      Yepes, Antonio Jimeno  and
      Koehn, Philipp  and
      Kocmi, Tom  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Morishita, Makoto  and
      Monz, Christof",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2021.wmt-1.48/",
    pages = "398--411",
    abstract = "In this paper, we focus on the task of multilingual machine translation for African languages and describe our contribution in the 2021 WMT Shared Task: Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation. We introduce MMTAfrica, the first many-to-many multilingual translation system for six African languages: Fon (fon), Igbo (ibo), Kinyarwanda (kin), Swahili/Kiswahili (swa), Xhosa (xho), and Yoruba (yor) and two non-African languages: English (eng) and French (fra). For multilingual translation concerning African languages, we introduce a novel backtranslation and reconstruction objective, BT{\&}REC, inspired by the random online back translation and T5 modelling framework respectively, to effectively leverage monolingual data. Additionally, we report improvements from MMTAfrica over the FLORES 101 benchmarks (spBLEU gains ranging from +0.58 in Swahili to French to +19.46 in French to Xhosa)."
}