Varepsilon kú mask: Integrating Yorùbá cultural greetings into machine translation

Idris Akinade, Jesujoba Alabi, David Adelani, Clement Odoje, Dietrich Klakow


Abstract
This paper investigates the performance of massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) systems in translating Yorùbá greetings (kú mask), which are a big part of Yorùbá language and culture, into English. To evaluate these models, we present IkiniYorùbá, a Yorùbá-English translation dataset containing some Yorùbá greetings, and sample use cases. We analysed the performance of different multilingual NMT systems including Google and NLLB and show that these models struggle to accurately translate Yorùbá greetings into English. In addition, we trained a Yorùbá-English model by fine-tuning an existing NMT model on the training split of IkiniYorùbá and this achieved better performance when compared to the pre-trained multilingual NMT models, although they were trained on a large volume of data.
Anthology ID:
2023.c3nlp-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP)
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Sunipa Dev, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, David Adelani, Dirk Hovy, Luciana Benotti
Venue:
C3NLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–7
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.c3nlp-1.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.c3nlp-1.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Idris Akinade, Jesujoba Alabi, David Adelani, Clement Odoje, and Dietrich Klakow. 2023. Varepsilon kú mask: Integrating Yorùbá cultural greetings into machine translation. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP), pages 1–7, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Varepsilon kú mask: Integrating Yorùbá cultural greetings into machine translation (Akinade et al., C3NLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.c3nlp-1.1.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.c3nlp-1.1.mp4