2020

Neural Machine Translation for South Africa's Official Languages

Martinus, Laura, Webster, Jason, Moonsamy, Joanne et al.

Understand

Recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) have led to state-of-the-art results for many European-based translation tasks.

  • However, despite these advances, there is has been little focus in applying these methods to African languages.
  • In this paper, we seek to address this gap by creating an NMT benchmark BLEU score between English and the ten remaining official languages in South Africa.

Built on

  • “Afrikaans: considering origins”

    Paul Roberge · 2002

    Earlier work this paper cites.

  • “Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units”

    Original

    Rico Sennrich, Barry Haddow and Alexandra Birch · 2015

    Earlier work this paper cites.

  • “Community Survey 2016 in Brief”

    StatsSA · 2016

    Earlier work this paper cites.

  • “Attention is All you Need”

    Ashish Vaswani et al · 2017

    Earlier work this paper cites.

Similar

  • “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding”

    Original

    Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee and Kristina Toutanova · 2018

    Cited alongside, same era.

  • “Benchmarking Neural Machine Translation for Southern African Languages”

    Jade Abbott and Laura Martinus · 2019

    Cited alongside, same era.

  • “JW300: A Wide-Coverage Parallel Corpus for Low-Resource Languages”

    Zeljko Agi“’c and Ivan Vuli“’c · 2019

    Cited alongside, same era.

  • “Ethnologue: Languages of the World”

    David Eberhard, Gary Simons and Charles Fenning

    Cited in the paper.

Then

  • “English in Multilingual South Africa: The Linguistics of Contact and Change”

    Raymond Hickey · 2019

    Later among the works it cites.

  • “Joey NMT: A Minimalist NMT Toolkit for Novices”

    Julia Kreutzer, Joost Bastings and Stefan Riezler · 2019

    Later among the works it cites.

  • “Dataset for comparable evaluation of machine translation between 11 South African languages”

    Cindy McKellar and Martin Puttkammer · 2020

    Closest in time.

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