English-Twi Parallel Corpus for Machine Translation

29 Mar 2021 · Paul Azunre, Salomey Osei, Salomey Addo, Lawrence Asamoah Adu-Gyamfi, Stephen Moore, Bernard Adabankah, Bernard Opoku, Clara Asare-Nyarko, Samuel Nyarko, Cynthia Amoaba, Esther Dansoa Appiah, Felix Akwerh, Richard Nii Lante Lawson, Joel Budu, Emmanuel Debrah, Nana Boateng, Wisdom Ofori, Edwin Buabeng-Munkoh, Franklin Adjei, Isaac Kojo Essel Ampomah, Joseph Otoo, Reindorf Borkor, Standylove Birago Mensah, Lucien Mensah, Mark Amoako Marcel, Anokye Acheampong Amponsah, James Ben Hayfron-Acquah ·

We present a parallel machine translation training corpus for English and Akuapem Twi of 25,421 sentence pairs. We used a transformer-based translator to generate initial translations in Akuapem Twi, which were later verified and corrected where necessary by native speakers to eliminate any occurrence of translationese. In addition, 697 higher quality crowd-sourced sentences are provided for use as an evaluation set for downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The typical use case for the larger human-verified dataset is for further training of machine translation models in Akuapem Twi. The higher quality 697 crowd-sourced dataset is recommended as a testing dataset for machine translation of English to Twi and Twi to English models. Furthermore, the Twi part of the crowd-sourced data may also be used for other tasks, such as representation learning, classification, etc. We fine-tune the transformer translation model on the training corpus and report benchmarks on the crowd-sourced test set.

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