Benchmarking Neural Machine Translation for Southern African Languages

Unlike major Western languages, most African languages are very low-resourced. Furthermore, the resources that do exist are often scattered and difficult to obtain and discover. As a result, the data and code for existing research has rarely been shared, meaning researchers struggle to reproduce reported results, and almost no publicly available benchmarks or leaderboards for African machine translation models exist. To start to address these problems, we trained neural machine translation models for a subset of Southern African languages on publicly-available datasets. We provide the code for training the models and evaluate the models on a newly released evaluation set, with the aim of starting a leaderboard for Southern African languages and spur future research in the field.