# Congolese Swahili Machine Translation for Humanitarian Response

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.10734 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10734/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [WikiMatrix: Mining 135M Parallel Sentences in 1620 Language Pairs from Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05791/) (2019)
- [Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02201/) (2016)
- [Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02353/) (2020)
- [TICO-19: the Translation Initiative for Covid-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01788/) (2020)
- [OpenNMT: Neural Machine Translation Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11462/) (2018)
- [Low Resource Neural Machine Translation: A Benchmark for Five African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14402/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02022/) (2022)
- [The Low-Resource Double Bind: An Empirical Study of Pruning for Low-Resource Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03036/) (2021)
- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [Toucan: Many-to-Many Translation for 150 African Language Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04796/) (2024)
- [Bootstrapping NLP tools across low-resourced African languages: an overview and prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12027/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.