How long is their dataset?
21214
Nigerian Pidgin is arguably the most widely spoken language in Nigeria. Variants of this language are also spoken across West and Central Africa, making it a very important language. This work aims to establish supervised and unsupervised neural machine translation (NMT) baselines between English and Nigerian Pidgin. We implement and compare NMT models with different tokenization methods, creating a solid foundation for future works.
Over 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria, but Nigerian Pidgin is the uniting language in the country. Between three and five million people are estimated to use this language as a first language in performing their daily activities. Nigerian Pidgin is also considered a second language to up to 75 million people in Nigeria, accounting for about half of the country's population according to BIBREF0. The language is considered an informal lingua franca and offers several benefits to the country. In 2020, 65% of Nigeria's population is estimated to have access to the internet according to BIBREF1. However, over 58.4% of the internet's content is in English language, while Nigerian languages, such as Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, account for less than 0.1% of internet content according to BIBREF2. For Nigerians to truly harness the advantages the internet offers, it is imperative that English content is able to be translated to Nigerian languages, and vice versa. This work is a first attempt towards using contemporary neural machine translation (NMT) techniques to perform machine translation for Nigerian Pidgin, establishing solid baselines that will ease and spur future work. We evaluate the performance of supervised and unsupervised neural machine translation models using word-level and the subword-level tokenization of BIBREF3.