mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages

arXiv 2204.04306 ↗First posted 8 Apr 2022cs.CL cs.AI cs.CYcited by 11

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Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we focus on the task of multilingual machine translation for African languages and describe our contribution in the 2021 WMT Shared Task: Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation. We introduce MMTAfrica, the first many-to-many multilingual translation system for six African languages: Fon (fon), Igbo (ibo), Kinyarwanda (kin), Swahili/Kiswahili (swa), Xhosa (xho), and Yoruba (yor) and two non-African languages: English (eng) and French (fra). For multilingual translation concerning African languages, we introduce a novel backtranslation and reconstruction objective, BT&REC, inspired by the random online back translation and T5 modeling framework respectively, to effectively leverage monolingual data. Additionally, we report improvements from MMTAfrica over the FLORES 101 benchmarks (spBLEU gains ranging from +0.58 in Swahili to French to +19.46 in French to Xhosa). We release our dataset and code source at https://github.com/edaiofficial/mmtafrica.

Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 50 of its 73 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2022.

Builds on

50 of 73 references.

References · 50

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38 more
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Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 2; 2023: 4; 2024: 2; 2025: 0; 2026: 3.

11 papers.

  1. 2022A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translationcited by 97
  2. 2022Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languagescited by 69
  3. 2023Democratizing LLMs for Low-Resource Languages by Leveraging their English Dominant Abilities with Linguistically-Diverse Promptscited by 45
  4. 2024State of NLP in Kenya: A Surveycited by 7
  5. 2023First Tragedy, then Parse: History Repeats Itself in the New Era of Large Language Modelscited by 4
  6. 2023Building a Parallel Corpus and Training Translation Models Between Luganda and Englishcited by 3
  7. 2023FonMTL: Towards Multitask Learning for the Fon Languagecited by 1
  8. 2024Beyond MLE: Investigating SEARNN for Low-Resourced Neural Machine Translationcited by 0
  9. 2026A Survey of Text and Speech Resources for Hausa and Fongbe: Availability, Quality, and Gaps for NLP Developmentcited by 0
  10. 2026Embedding Initialization for Unseen Low-resource Languages in Multilingual NMT: A Case Study on Limbum-English Translationcited by 0
  11. 2026TranslatePsy-AfriSLM: High-Quality Data Scaling For Low-Resource Machine Translationcited by 0