MorisienMT: A Dataset for Mauritian Creole Machine Translation

TL;DR

MorisienMT introduces a new dataset for Mauritian Creole machine translation, enabling benchmarking and research to improve translation quality for this French-based creole language.

Contribution

The paper presents the first publicly available parallel and monolingual corpora for Morisien, along with baseline models for machine translation research.

Findings

Created MorisienMT dataset for English-Morisien and French-Morisien translation

Established baseline translation models using the dataset

Released datasets publicly to foster further research

Abstract

In this paper, we describe MorisienMT, a dataset for benchmarking machine translation quality of Mauritian Creole. Mauritian Creole (Morisien) is the lingua franca of the Republic of Mauritius and is a French-based creole language. MorisienMT consists of a parallel corpus between English and Morisien, French and Morisien and a monolingual corpus for Morisien. We first give an overview of Morisien and then describe the steps taken to create the corpora and, from it, the training and evaluation splits. Thereafter, we establish a variety of baseline models using the created parallel corpora as well as large French--English corpora for transfer learning. We release our datasets publicly for research purposes and hope that this spurs research for Morisien machine translation.