Exploring the sawa corpus: collection and deployment of a parallel corpus English—Swahili

TitleExploring the sawa corpus: collection and deployment of a parallel corpus English—Swahili
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2011
AuthorsDe Pauw, Guy, Wagacha Peter W., and de Schryver Gilles-Maurice
Journal TitleLanguage Resources and Evaluation
Journal Date09/2011
Volume45
Issue3
Pagination331-344
ISSN1574-020X
Abstract

Research in machine translation and corpus annotation has greatly benefited from the increasing availability of word-aligned parallel corpora. This paper presents ongoing research on the development and application of the sawa corpus, a two-million-word parallel corpus English—Swahili. We describe the data collection phase and zero in on the difficulties of finding appropriate and easily accessible data for this language pair. In the data annotation phase, the corpus was semi-automatically sentence and word-aligned and morphosyntactic information was added to both the English and Swahili portion of the corpus. The annotated parallel corpus allows us to investigate two possible uses. We describe experiments with the projection of part-of-speech tagging annotation from English onto Swahili, as well as the development of a basic statistical machine translation system for this language pair, using the parallel corpus and a consolidated database of existing English—Swahili translation dictionaries. We particularly focus on the difficulties of translating English into the morphologically more complex Bantu language of Swahili.

URLhttps://www.springerlink.com/content/6650157426v8318t/
DOI10.1007/s10579-011-9159-7