Masakhane -- Machine Translation For Africa

TL;DR

Masakhane is an open-source initiative that aims to improve machine translation for African languages by building a community, fostering research, and addressing resource and benchmark scarcity in African NLP.

Contribution

This paper introduces the Masakhane project, a collaborative effort to develop NLP resources and benchmarks for African languages, filling a critical gap in the field.

Findings

Successful community building across African countries

Increased research output on African language translation

Development of initial translation benchmarks

Abstract

Africa has over 2000 languages. Despite this, African languages account for a small portion of available resources and publications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is due to multiple factors, including: a lack of focus from government and funding, discoverability, a lack of community, sheer language complexity, difficulty in reproducing papers and no benchmarks to compare techniques. To begin to address the identified problems, MASAKHANE, an open-source, continent-wide, distributed, online research effort for machine translation for African languages, was founded. In this paper, we discuss our methodology for building the community and spurring research from the African continent, as well as outline the success of the community in terms of addressing the identified problems affecting African NLP.