Parallel Corpora for bi-Directional Statistical Machine Translation for Seven Ethiopian Language Pairs

Solomon Teferra Abate, Michael Melese, Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Million Meshesha, Solomon Atinafu, Wondwossen Mulugeta, Yaregal Assabie, Hafte Abera, Binyam Ephrem, Tewodros Abebe, Wondimagegnhue Tsegaye, Amanuel Lemma, Tsegaye Andargie, Seifedin Shifaw


Abstract
In this paper, we describe the development of parallel corpora for Ethiopian Languages: Amharic, Tigrigna, Afan-Oromo, Wolaytta and Geez. To check the usability of all the corpora we conducted baseline bi-directional statistical machine translation (SMT) experiments for seven language pairs. The performance of the bi-directional SMT systems shows that all the corpora can be used for further investigations. We have also shown that the morphological complexity of the Ethio-Semitic languages has a negative impact on the performance of the SMT especially when they are target languages. Based on the results we obtained, we are currently working towards handling the morphological complexities to improve the performance of statistical machine translation among the Ethiopian languages.
Anthology ID:
W18-3812
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Linguistic Resources for Natural Language Processing
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Peter Machonis, Anabela Barreiro, Kristina Kocijan, Max Silberztein
Venue:
LR4NLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
83–90
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-3812
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Solomon Teferra Abate, Michael Melese, Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Million Meshesha, Solomon Atinafu, Wondwossen Mulugeta, Yaregal Assabie, Hafte Abera, Binyam Ephrem, Tewodros Abebe, Wondimagegnhue Tsegaye, Amanuel Lemma, Tsegaye Andargie, and Seifedin Shifaw. 2018. Parallel Corpora for bi-Directional Statistical Machine Translation for Seven Ethiopian Language Pairs. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Linguistic Resources for Natural Language Processing, pages 83–90, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Parallel Corpora for bi-Directional Statistical Machine Translation for Seven Ethiopian Language Pairs (Teferra Abate et al., LR4NLP 2018)
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https://aclanthology.org/W18-3812.pdf