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Experimenting Statistical Machine Translation for Ethiopic Semitic Languages: The Case of Amharic-Tigrigna

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Information and Communication Technology for Development for Africa (ICT4DA 2017)

Abstract

In this research an attempt have been made to experiment on Amharic-Tigrigna machine translation for promoting information sharing. Since there is no Amharic-Tigrigna parallel text corpus, we prepared a parallel text corpus for Amharic-Tigrigna machine translation system from religious domain specifically from bible. Consequently, the data preparation involves sentence alignment, sentence splitting, tokenization, normalization of Amharic-Tigrigna parallel corpora and then splitting the dataset into training, tuning and testing data. Then, Amharic-Tigrigna translation model have been constructed using training data and further tuned for better translation. Finally, given target language model, the Amharic-Tigrigna translation system generates a target output with reference to translation model using word and morpheme as a unit. The result we found from the experiment is promising to design Amharic-Tigrigna machine translation system between resource deficient languages. We are now working on post-editing to enhance the performance of the bi-lingual Amharic-Tigrigna translator.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Available at https://www.perl.org.

  2. 2.

    Available at https://www.python.org.

  3. 3.

    The unit obtained with Morfessor segmentation is referred here as morpheme without any linguistic definition of morpheme.

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Ethiopia Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) for funding to collect parallel text corpus and conduct an experiement for a bilingual Amharic-Tigrigna statistical machine translation research project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

    Michael Melese Woldeyohannis & Million Meshesha

Authors
  1. Michael Melese Woldeyohannis
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  2. Million Meshesha
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael Melese Woldeyohannis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Pretoria, South Africa

    Fisseha Mekuria

  2. Information Technology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Ethiopia Enideg Nigussie

  3. Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany

    Waltenegus Dargie

  4. Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

    Mutafugwa Edward

  5. Bahir Dar Institute of Technology, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

    Tesfa Tegegne

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© 2018 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Woldeyohannis, M.M., Meshesha, M. (2018). Experimenting Statistical Machine Translation for Ethiopic Semitic Languages: The Case of Amharic-Tigrigna. In: Mekuria, F., Nigussie, E., Dargie, W., Edward, M., Tegegne, T. (eds) Information and Communication Technology for Development for Africa. ICT4DA 2017. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 244. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95153-9_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95153-9_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-95152-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-95153-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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