# varepsilon K'U <MASK>: Integrating Yor`ub'a cultural greetings into machine translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17972 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17972/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03193/) (2021)
- [Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00089/) (2019)
- [CCMatrix: Mining Billions of High-Quality Parallel Sentences on the WEB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04944/) (2019)
- [CCAligned: A Massive Collection of Cross-Lingual Web-Document Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06154/) (2019)
- [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02022/) (2022)
- [Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03983/) (2022)
- [Investigating Multilingual NMT Representations at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02197/) (2019)
- [The Effect of Domain and Diacritics in Yor`ub'a-English Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08647/) (2021)
- [Examining the Tip of the Iceberg: A Data Set for Idiom Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04681/) (2018)
- [Automatic Evaluation and Analysis of Idioms in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04545/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Benchmarking Machine Translation with Cultural Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14328/) (2023)
- [Culturally Aware and Adapted NLP: A Taxonomy and a Survey of the State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03930/) (2024)
- [A Material Lens on Coloniality in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08391/) (2023)
- [Towards Geographic Inclusion in the Evaluation of Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04457/) (2024)
- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [Voices Unheard: NLP Resources and Models for Yor`ub'a Regional Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19564/) (2024)
- [Bridging Gaps in Natural Language Processing for Yor`ub'a: A Systematic Review of a Decade of Progress and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17364/) (2025)
- [CultureMINE: Datasets and Methods for Improving the Cultural Capabilities of NLP Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22494/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper investigates the performance of massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) systems in translating Yor`ub'a greetings (varepsilon k'u [MASK]), which are a big part of Yor`ub'a language and culture, into English. To evaluate these models, we present IkiniYor`ub'a, a Yor`ub'a-English translation dataset containing some Yor`ub'a greetings, and sample use cases. We analysed the performance of different multilingual NMT systems including Google and NLLB and show that these models struggle to accurately translate Yor`ub'a greetings into English. In addition, we trained a Yor`ub'a-English model by finetuning an existing NMT model on the training split of IkiniYor`ub'a and this achieved better performance when compared to the pre-trained multilingual NMT models, although they were trained on a large volume of data.