{"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/masakhane-machine-translation-for-africa","title":"Masakhane -- Machine Translation For Africa","arxiv_id":"2003.11529","date":"2020-03-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Iroro Orife","Julia Kreutzer","Blessing Sibanda","Daniel Whitenack","Kathleen Siminyu","Laura Martinus","Jamiil Toure Ali","Jade Abbott","Vukosi Marivate","Salomon Kabongo","Musie Meressa","Espoir Murhabazi","Orevaoghene Ahia","Elan van Biljon","Arshath Ramkilowan","Adewale Akinfaderin","Alp Öktem","Wole Akin","Ghollah Kioko","Kevin Degila","Herman Kamper","Bonaventure Dossou","Chris Emezue","Kelechi Ogueji","Abdallah Bashir"],"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.11529v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.11529v1.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":"masakhane-machine-translation-for-africa","repo_url":"https://github.com/masakhane-io/masakhane","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}},{"paper_slug":"masakhane-machine-translation-for-africa","repo_url":"https://github.com/masakhane-io/masakhane-mt","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2003.11529","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2003.11529","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}