Building resources for Emakhuwa: machine translation and news classification benchmarks

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2024

Authors

Ali, Felermino (Author) Other; Cardoso, Henrique Lopes (Author) FEUP; Sousa-Silva, Rui (Author) FLUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Pages: 14842-14857

2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language ProcessingExportar publicação no formato APA

Miami, 2024

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Authenticus ID: P-018-3EK

DOI: 10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.824

Abstract (EN): This paper introduces a comprehensive collection of NLP resources for Emakhuwa, Mozambique’s most widely spoken language. The resources include the first manually translated news bitext corpus between Portuguese and Emakhuwa, news topic classification datasets, and monolingual data. We detail the process and challenges of acquiring this data and present benchmark results for machine translation and news topic classification tasks. Our evaluation examines the impact of different data types—originally clean text, post-corrected OCR, and back-translated data—and the effects of fine-tuning from pre-trained models, including those focused on African languages.Our benchmarks demonstrate good performance in news topic classification and promising results in machine translation. We fine-tuned multilingual encoder-decoder models using real and synthetic data and evaluated them on our test set and the FLORES evaluation sets. The results highlight the importance of incorporating more data and potential for future improvements.All models, code, and datasets are available in the https://huggingface.co/LIACC repository under the CC BY 4.0 license.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific