Dialect Matters: A Dialect-Aware Baseline for Igala-English Machine Translation

The massive permeability of intelligent systems in every sphere of human activities have greatly enhanced clarity, ease of work, and increased general global understanding which has significantly awaken the use of intelligent systems by all users. Intelligent systems greatly rely on precise dataset/corpus for the correctness of their output. Despite efforts by researchers to address Low-resource language in the Natural Language Processing (NLP), Igala still has zero parallel corpora despite efforts by researchers. We present a dialect-aware baseline for Igala-English machine translation, among first open systems and first with dialectal variation analysis. Our dataset of 1137 sentences (899 training) is first with dialect tags: Idah 459 (40.4%), Ankpa 297 (26.1%), Ibaji 160 (14.1%), Other 187 (16.4%), Ogugu 32 (2.8%). Same English yields 20-60 Igala forms. Mixed-dialect training achieves balanced BLEU 11.66 versus Idah-only model which drops 4.7 BLEU on Ibaji (13.2 on Idah, 8.5 on Ibaji), proving dialect fairness requires mixing. Fine-tuned from Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-mul (78M), epoch ablation shows convergence at 8 epochs and overfitting at 15. BLEU 11.66, chrF 46.69. Analysis shows 899 sentences on log-linear trend consistent with African low-resource literature. This work provides first dialectal impact analysis for Igala and establishes baseline for future work.