HausaMT v1.0: Towards English–Hausa Neural Machine Translation

This is an ongoing work on Neural Machine Translation for English-Hausa. According to Sebastian Ruder, one of the biggest open problems for NLP is NMT for low-resource languages. NMT suffers a language diversity problem and growing up in a multi-lingual community with about 300 languages and thousands of dialects, I decided to work on NMT for the second largest Afro-Asiatic language after Arabic — Hausa Language. Hausa is also the third largest trade language across a larger swathe of West Africa after English and French. I have started working on this and the results are pretty good so far. I’m currently collaborating with scholars from the Niger-Volta Language Technologies Institute and working with some starter notebooks created by the Masakhane community.