Toucan: Many-to-Many Translation for 150 African Language Pairs

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Elmadany, AbdelRahim, Adebara, Ife, Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Elmadany, AbdelRahim
Adebara, Ife
Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad
author_facet Elmadany, AbdelRahim
Adebara, Ife
Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad
contents We address a notable gap in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by introducing a collection of resources designed to improve Machine Translation (MT) for low-resource languages, with a specific focus on African languages. First, we introduce two language models (LMs), Cheetah-1.2B and Cheetah-3.7B, with 1.2 billion and 3.7 billion parameters respectively. Next, we finetune the aforementioned models to create toucan, an Afrocentric machine translation model designed to support 156 African language pairs. To evaluate Toucan, we carefully develop an extensive machine translation benchmark, dubbed AfroLingu-MT, tailored for evaluating machine translation. Toucan significantly outperforms other models, showcasing its remarkable performance on MT for African languages. Finally, we train a new model, spBLEU-1K, to enhance translation evaluation metrics, covering 1K languages, including 614 African languages. This work aims to advance the field of NLP, fostering cross-cultural understanding and knowledge exchange, particularly in regions with limited language resources such as Africa. The GitHub repository for the Toucan project is available at https://github.com/UBC-NLP/Toucan.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_04796
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Toucan: Many-to-Many Translation for 150 African Language Pairs
Elmadany, AbdelRahim
Adebara, Ife
Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad
Computation and Language
We address a notable gap in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by introducing a collection of resources designed to improve Machine Translation (MT) for low-resource languages, with a specific focus on African languages. First, we introduce two language models (LMs), Cheetah-1.2B and Cheetah-3.7B, with 1.2 billion and 3.7 billion parameters respectively. Next, we finetune the aforementioned models to create toucan, an Afrocentric machine translation model designed to support 156 African language pairs. To evaluate Toucan, we carefully develop an extensive machine translation benchmark, dubbed AfroLingu-MT, tailored for evaluating machine translation. Toucan significantly outperforms other models, showcasing its remarkable performance on MT for African languages. Finally, we train a new model, spBLEU-1K, to enhance translation evaluation metrics, covering 1K languages, including 614 African languages. This work aims to advance the field of NLP, fostering cross-cultural understanding and knowledge exchange, particularly in regions with limited language resources such as Africa. The GitHub repository for the Toucan project is available at https://github.com/UBC-NLP/Toucan.
title Toucan: Many-to-Many Translation for 150 African Language Pairs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04796