LOW-RESOURCE NEURAL MACHINE TRANSLATION: A BENCHMARK FOR FIVE AFRICAN LANGUAGES
# Low Resource Neural Machine Ttranslation: A Benchmark For Five African Languages
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This repo provides data and experimental details for the paper LOW-RESOURCE NEURAL MACHINE TRANSLATION: A BENCHMARK FOR FIVE AFRICAN LANGUAGES
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Updates:
- [July 2020] Data and scripts are available (see ./data, ./scripts directories)
- [March, 2020] Data, scripts, pre-trained models will be available asap.
## Paper Summary / Approaches
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*...benchmark
NMT between English and five African LRL pairs (Swahili, Amharic, Tigrigna,
Oromo, Somali [SATOS]). We collected the available resources on the SATOS
languages to evaluate the current state of NMT for LRLs. Our evaluation, comparing a baseline single language pair __supervised NMT__ model against __semi-supervised__ learning, __transfer-learning__, and __multilingual modeling__, shows significant performance
improvements both in the En → LRL and LRL → En directions.*
Baseline Supervised NMT
- Benchmarks a single language pair NMT models between En and the SATOS languages.
Semi-Supervised NMT
- Utilizes back-translation that leverages monolingual data to improve the supervised models.
Transfer-Learning NMT
- Utilizes dynamic transfer-learning approach from a parent multilingual model to initialize single language pair child models.
Multilingual NMT
- Trains a multilingual model ( of 10 directions) aggregating data from all the pairs.
*Additional summaries on each of these approaches can be found in the paper. Further readings on semi-supervised, transfer-learning, and multilingual-nmt*
## Data and Experimental Setup
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### Requirements
- NMT Library OpenNMT-tf
- Mosesdecoder
- SentenciePiece
- WikiExtractor
- Opus Corpus Tools
For installing requirements and initial setup, run: `./env-setup.sh`
## Data Preparation
- Monolingual Data (wikipedia articles)
`./scripts/get-monolingual-data.sh [lang-id]`
- Parallel Data (Opus data of differen corpus)
`./scripts/get-opus-data.sh [src-lang-id] [tgt-lan …