Paper ID: 2405.05376

Krey\`ol-MT: Building MT for Latin American, Caribbean and Colonial African Creole Languages

Nathaniel R. Robinson, Raj Dabre, Ammon Shurtz, Rasul Dent, Onenamiyi Onesi, Claire Bizon Monroc, Loïc Grobol, Hasan Muhammad, Ashi Garg, Naome A. Etori, Vijay Murari Tiyyala, Olanrewaju Samuel, Matthew Dean Stutzman, Bismarck Bamfo Odoom, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Stephen D. Richardson, Kenton Murray

A majority of language technologies are tailored for a small number of high-resource languages, while relatively many low-resource languages are neglected. One such group, Creole languages, have long been marginalized in academic study, though their speakers could benefit from machine translation (MT). These languages are predominantly used in much of Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. We present the largest cumulative dataset to date for Creole language MT, including 14.5M unique Creole sentences with parallel translations -- 11.6M of which we release publicly, and the largest bitexts gathered to date for 41 languages -- the first ever for 21. In addition, we provide MT models supporting all 41 Creole languages in 172 translation directions. Given our diverse dataset, we produce a model for Creole language MT exposed to more genre diversity than ever before, which outperforms a genre-specific Creole MT model on its own benchmark for 26 of 34 translation directions.

Submitted: May 8, 2024