# Machine Translation for Nko: Tools, Corpora and Baseline Results

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15612 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15612/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2023.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Subword Regularization: Improving Neural Network Translation Models with Multiple Subword Candidates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10959/) (2018)
- [Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04558/) (2016)
- [BPE-Dropout: Simple and Effective Subword Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13267/) (2019)
- [Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02353/) (2020)
- [Multi-task Sequence to Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06114/) (2015)
- [Generalized Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03785/) (2019)
- [MT-Adapted Datasheets for Datasets: Template and Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13156/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Compositional Translation: A Novel LLM-based Approach for Low-resource Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04554/) (2025)
- [Outliers and Calibration Sets have Diminishing Effect on Quantization of Modern LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20835/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Currently, there is no usable machine translation system for Nko, a language spoken by tens of millions of people across multiple West African countries, which holds significant cultural and educational value. To address this issue, we present a set of tools, resources, and baseline results aimed towards the development of usable machine translation systems for Nko and other languages that do not currently have sufficiently large parallel text corpora available. (1) Friaparallelel: A novel collaborative parallel text curation software that incorporates quality control through copyedit-based workflows. (2) Expansion of the FLoRes-200 and NLLB-Seed corpora with 2,009 and 6,193 high-quality Nko translations in parallel with 204 and 40 other languages. (3) nicolingua-0005: A collection of trilingual and bilingual corpora with 130,850 parallel segments and monolingual corpora containing over 3 million Nko words. (4) Baseline bilingual and multilingual neural machine translation results with the best model scoring 30.83 English-Nko chrF++ on FLoRes-devtest.