# PidginUNMT: Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation from West African Pidgin to English

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.03444 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03444/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [What a Creole Wants, What a Creole Needs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00437/) (2022)
- [On Language Models for Creoles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06074/) (2021)
- [Cheetah: Natural Language Generation for 517 African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01053/) (2024)
- [Krey`ol-MT: Building MT for Latin American, Caribbean and Colonial African Creole Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05376/) (2024)
- [Where Are We? Evaluating LLM Performance on African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19582/) (2025)
- [CreoleVal: Multilingual Multitask Benchmarks for Creoles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19567/) (2023)
- [How Good are Commercial Large Language Models on African Languages?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06530/) (2023)
- [Low-Resource Cross-Lingual Adaptive Training for Nigerian Pidgin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00382/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Review of NLP for Ghanaian Languages: Datasets, Models, and a Research Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06818/) (2024)
- [Modeling Orthographic Variation Improves NLP Performance for Nigerian Pidgin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18264/) (2024)
- [Limited-Resource Adapters Are Regularizers, Not Linguists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24525/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Over 800 languages are spoken across West Africa. Despite the obvious diversity among people who speak these languages, one language significantly unifies them all - West African Pidgin English. There are at least 80 million speakers of West African Pidgin English. However, there is no known natural language processing (NLP) work on this language. In this work, we perform the first NLP work on the most popular variant of the language, providing three major contributions. First, the provision of a Pidgin corpus of over 56000 sentences, which is the largest we know of. Secondly, the training of the first ever cross-lingual embedding between Pidgin and English. This aligned embedding will be helpful in the performance of various downstream tasks between English and Pidgin. Thirdly, the training of an Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation model between Pidgin and English which achieves BLEU scores of 7.93 from Pidgin to English, and 5.18 from English to Pidgin. In all, this work greatly reduces the barrier of entry for future NLP works on West African Pidgin English.