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).- Anthology ID:
- 2021.wmt-1.48
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Loic Barrault, Ondrej Bojar, Fethi Bougares, Rajen Chatterjee, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Alexander Fraser, Markus Freitag, Yvette Graham, Roman Grundkiewicz, Paco Guzman, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Philipp Koehn, Tom Kocmi, Andre Martins, Makoto Morishita, Christof Monz
- Venue:
- WMT
- SIG:
- SIGMT
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 398–411
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.wmt-1.48
- DOI:
- Bibkey:
- Cite (ACL):
- Chris Chinenye Emezue and Bonaventure F. P. Dossou. 2021. MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages. In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 398–411, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages (Emezue & Dossou, WMT 2021)
- Copy Citation:
- PDF:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.wmt-1.48.pdf
- Code
- edaiofficial/mmtafrica
Export citation
@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://aclanthology.org/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).", }
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%0 Conference Proceedings %T MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages %A Emezue, Chris Chinenye %A Dossou, Bonaventure F. P. %Y Barrault, Loic %Y Bojar, Ondrej %Y Bougares, Fethi %Y Chatterjee, Rajen %Y Costa-jussa, Marta R. %Y Federmann, Christian %Y Fishel, Mark %Y Fraser, Alexander %Y Freitag, Markus %Y Graham, Yvette %Y Grundkiewicz, Roman %Y Guzman, Paco %Y Haddow, Barry %Y Huck, Matthias %Y Yepes, Antonio Jimeno %Y Koehn, Philipp %Y Kocmi, Tom %Y Martins, Andre %Y Morishita, Makoto %Y Monz, Christof %S Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation %D 2021 %8 November %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Online %F emezue-dossou-2021-mmtafrica %X 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). %U https://aclanthology.org/2021.wmt-1.48 %P 398-411
Markdown (Informal)
[MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages](https://aclanthology.org/2021.wmt-1.48) (Emezue & Dossou, WMT 2021)
- MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages (Emezue & Dossou, WMT 2021)
ACL
- Chris Chinenye Emezue and Bonaventure F. P. Dossou. 2021. MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages. In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 398–411, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.