Abstract
In Africa, and the world at large, there is an increasing focus on developing Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems to overcome language barriers. NMT for Low-resource language is particularly compelling as it involves learning with limited labelled data. However, obtaining a well-aligned parallel corpus for low-resource languages can be challenging. The disparity between the technological advancement of a few global languages and the lack of research on NMT for local languages in Chad is striking. End-to-end NMT trials on low-resource Chad languages have not been attempted. Additionally, there is a dearth of online and well-structured data gathering for research in Natural Language Processing, unlike some African languages. However, a guided approach for data gathering can produce bitext data for many Chadian language translation pairs with well-known languages that have ample data. In this project, we created the first sba-Fr Dataset, which is a corpus of Ngambay-to-French translations, and fine-tuned three pre-trained models using this dataset. Our experiments show that the M2M100 model outperforms other models with high BLEU scores on both original and original+synthetic data. The publicly available bitext dataset can be used for research purposes.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.nlp4tia-1.6
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP Tools and Resources for Translation and Interpreting Applications
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Varna, Bulgaria
- Editors:
- Raquel Lázaro Gutiérrez, Antonio Pareja, Ruslan Mitkov
- Venues:
- NLP4TIA | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
- Note:
- Pages:
- 39–47
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4tia-1.6
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Toadoum Sari Sakayo, Angela Fan, and Lema Logamou Seknewna. 2023. Ngambay-French Neural Machine Translation (sba-Fr). In Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP Tools and Resources for Translation and Interpreting Applications, pages 39–47, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
- Cite (Informal):
- Ngambay-French Neural Machine Translation (sba-Fr) (Sakayo et al., NLP4TIA-WS 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2023.nlp4tia-1.6.pdf