Abstract
This chapter reports on the creation of a massive parallel corpus—towards the development of a Hausa (Afroasiatic)-to-English machine translation (MT) system. We discuss the progress so far made in MT and the rapid evolution of commercial MT systems. We found that none of these systems has satisfactorily addressed MT resources for low-resourced languages. To support this course, therefore, we demonstrate our experience in a collaborative research “SCRIPT: Speech Synthesis for Spoken Content Production”—a 3-year (2017–2020) research and innovation project aimed at developing synthetic voices for low-resourced languages, and hosted at The Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR)—University of Edinburgh, UK. The current MT resource creation is supported by a limited funding from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND), Nigeria; and is expected to evolve (in the long run) into a massive parallel translation corpus. We target the following resource types: (1) audio/video recordings, and (2) freely available texts, books, including authors-generated materials. We present the methods for achieving our first parallel corpus, for the “Ibadan 400 Wordlist”—a set of basic English words selected from common (everyday) activities. A larger project funding/grant to actualize the desired goal of the present research is expected. This research is certain to revolutionize MT research in Nigeria and unleash the numerous potentials of multilingual MT for low-resource languages.
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Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Nigeria, under the Institutional Based Research (IBR) Project Intervention.
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Ekpenyong, M.E., Suleiman, A.A., Salihu, M. (2022). Towards Massive Parallel Corpus Creation for Hausa-to-English Machine Translation. In: Ekpenyong, M.E., Udoh, I.I. (eds) Current Issues in Descriptive Linguistics and Digital Humanities. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2932-8_36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2932-8_36
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