{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/congolese-swahili-machine-translation-for","title":"Congolese Swahili Machine Translation for Humanitarian Response","arxiv_id":"2103.10734","date":"2021-03-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Alp Öktem","Eric DeLuca","Rodrigue Bashizi","Eric Paquin","Grace Tang"],"abstract":"In this paper we describe our efforts to make a bidirectional Congolese Swahili (SWC) to French (FRA) neural machine translation system with the motivation of improving humanitarian translation workflows. For training, we created a 25,302-sentence general domain parallel corpus and combined it with publicly available data. Experimenting with low-resource methodologies like cross-dialect transfer and semi-supervised learning, we recorded improvements of up to 2.4 and 3.5 BLEU points in the SWC-FRA and FRA-SWC directions, respectively. We performed human evaluations to assess the usability of our models in a COVID-domain chatbot that operates in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Direct assessment in the SWC-FRA direction demonstrated an average quality ranking of 6.3 out of 10 with 75% of the target strings conveying the main message of the source text. For the FRA-SWC direction, our preliminary tests on post-editing assessment showed its potential usefulness for machine-assisted translation. We make our models, datasets containing up to 1 million sentences, our development pipeline, and a translator web-app available for public use.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.10734v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.10734v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"congolese-swahili-machine-translation-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/translatorswb/TWB-MT","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"LGPL-3.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"chatbot","task_name":"Chatbot"},{"task_slug":"humanitarian","task_name":"Humanitarian"},{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"congolese-swahili-french-parallel-text","name":"Congolese Swahili – French parallel text corpora","full_name":""}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}