Tigrinya Neural Machine Translation with Transfer Learning for Humanitarian Response

Abstract

We report our experiments in building a domain-specific Tigrinya-to-English neural machine translation system. We use transfer learning from other Ge'ez script languages and report an improvement of 1.3 BLEU points over a classic neural baseline. We publish our development pipeline as an open-source library and also provide a demonstration application.

Pre-print accepted to Africa NLP workshop organized within Eighth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2020)