Nollywood: Let's Go to the Movies!

TL;DR

This paper develops a phonetic subtitle model to translate Nigerian English speech to American English and assesses toxicity levels to improve understanding and safety of Nollywood movies for diverse audiences.

Contribution

It introduces a novel phonetic subtitle model for Nigerian English and applies toxicity detection to enhance accessibility and safety in Nollywood films.

Findings

Successful phonetic translation of Nigerian English to American English.

Effective toxicity detection in Nollywood movie speech.

Improved understanding for native speakers of Nigerian dialects.

Abstract

Nollywood, based on the idea of Bollywood from India, is a series of outstanding movies that originate from Nigeria. Unfortunately, while the movies are in English, they are hard to understand for many native speakers due to the dialect of English that is spoken. In this article, we accomplish two goals: (1) create a phonetic sub-title model that is able to translate Nigerian English speech to American English and (2) use the most advanced toxicity detectors to discover how toxic the speech is. Our aim is to highlight the text in these videos which is often times ignored for lack of dialectal understanding due the fact that many people in Nigeria speak a native language like Hausa at home.