Thread by @vukosi

Introducing Masakhane WEB - A Machine Translation Web Platform for African Languages. This is a research tool that can showcase the translation models that @MasakhaneNLP has developed in the last year and assist with improvements.

Go to translate.masakhane.io
#AfricaNLP 1/n

This research tool was developed by Catherine Gitau @categitau_ , Salomon Kabenamualu @SalomonKabongo, Abiodun Modupe @dupeabbey and myself with affiliations at the Data Science for Social Impact (dsfsi.github.io) group at @UPTuks and AMMI at @AIMS_Next Ghana. 2/n

We have a nice tool you can use, but there is more. We release the tool itself as open-source software. It has a backend with an API and a frontend. These can be improved upon. The development was funded through Mozilla Open Source Support @mozilla
github.com/dsfsi/masakhan… 3/n

The @MasakhaneNLP project recently received a @Wikimedia Research award for the paper "Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages" - aclweb.org/anthology/2020…

The Masakhane Web tool makes the work more accessible 4/n

@UPTuks has an article that covers this and shares some of my thoughts on why the work of @MasakhaneNLP is important.

"Award for African machine learning interface developed in collaboration with the University of Pretoria’s computer scientists" - up.ac.za/faculty-of-eng… 5/n

We are honoured to continue to be able to work with the great community of researchers who collaborate to push #AfricanNLP #AfricanNLP and push African Languages on the language Map.

See the community here masakhane.io/community 6/n

To finish my thoughts. 2019 was the @UNESCO International Year of Indigenous Languages - un.org/development/de….

We have to do more to make sure our local languages count in the digital realm, this is just one of the steps.

@dsigovza @NRF_News @SADiLaR_ZA @ArtsCultureSA

Did you know you can give feedback on the translation quality of the languages on the system? You can try a translation and then click the "feedback" button to give feedback on the quality. More languages will launch. You can also let us know which languages you are interested in

We currently cover
English to ->

Igbo
Lingala
Setswana
Shona
Swahili
Tshiluba
Yoruba
🌍

Reverse translations will be available soon, as well as a few African languages to African Language models. Let us know if the model works or doesn't, via the feedback button.