# The Effect of Normalization for Bi-directional Amharic-English Neural Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15224/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [Measuring and Improving Consistency in Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01017/) (2021)
- [OpenNMT: Open-source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03815/) (2017)
- [Improving the Transformer Translation Model with Document-Level Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03581/) (2018)
- [A Convolutional Encoder Model for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02344/) (2016)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning Techniques for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07526/) (2020)
- [Acquiring Knowledge from Pre-trained Model to Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01774/) (2019)
- [Extended Parallel Corpus for Amharic-English Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03543/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Amharic Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14386/) (2020)

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

- [SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06845/) (2023)
- [Natural Language Processing in Ethiopian Languages: Current State, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14406/) (2023)
- [EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13737/) (2024)
- [Parallel Corpus for Indigenous Language Translation: Spanish-Mazatec and Spanish-Mixtec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17404/) (2023)
- [Automatic Translation of Hate Speech to Non-hate Speech in Social Media Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01261/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine translation (MT) is one of the main tasks in natural language processing whose objective is to translate texts automatically from one natural language to another. Nowadays, using deep neural networks for MT tasks has received great attention. These networks require lots of data to learn abstract representations of the input and store it in continuous vectors. This paper presents the first relatively large-scale Amharic-English parallel sentence dataset. Using these compiled data, we build bi-directional Amharic-English translation models by fine-tuning the existing Facebook M2M100 pre-trained model achieving a BLEU score of 37.79 in Amharic-English 32.74 in English-Amharic translation. Additionally, we explore the effects of Amharic homophone normalization on the machine translation task. The results show that the normalization of Amharic homophone characters increases the performance of Amharic-English machine translation in both directions.