Igbo-English Machine Translation:An Evaluation Benchmark
Table 2: Splits of the Benchmark Evaluation Parallel Data
['[BOLD] Type', '[BOLD] Sent pairs', '[BOLD] Sources']
To achieve the objectives above, the task was broken down in the following phases: Phase 1: Raw data collection and pre-processing : This phase is to produce cleaned and pre-processed a minimum 10,000 sentences: 5,000 English and 5,000 Igbo. It involved the collection, cleaning and pre-processing (normalisation, diacritic restoration, spelling correction etc.) of Igbo and English sentences from freely available electronic texts (e.g. Wikipedia, CommonCrawl, local government materials, local TV/Radio stations etc). Phase 2: Translation and correction In this phase, the 10,000 sentence pairs are created manual translation and correction. The key tasks include: Translating English sentences to Igbo (EN-IG) Translating Igbo sentences to English (IG-EN) Correcting the translations 5 Igbo speakers were engaged for the bidirectional of translations while 3 other Igbo speakers, including an Igbo linguist are assisting with the on-going corrections. Chunks (≈ 250 each) of sentences are given to each translator in each direction (i.e. IG-EN and EN-IG).