2 Nigerian AI engineers develop world’s first pidgin-to-English translation model

Two Nigerian artificial intelligence engineers identified as Orevaoghene Ahia, 21, and Kelechi Ogueji, 23, have both succeeded in developing the world’s first pidgin-to-English translation model.

According to reports, Ogueji and Ahia alongside their other colleagues at the Nigerian office of InstaDeep, an AI research and solutions firm – successfully developed the model for the translation from June to August this year.

The project is published and was accepted – after peer review – at this year’s NeurIPS conference, the world’s largest gathering of artificial intelligence researchers and enthusiasts, which held last week in Vancouver, Canada.

Ahia said that with little pidgin English used online in writing as there’s no Wikipedia Pidgin. it was hard finding data for a decent translation project which proved to be the first major hindrance.

She said that the challenge led them to train an Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (UNMT) model.

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“Essentially, they created a pidgin-English catalogue of word pairs from scratch, scraping 56,695 pidgin sentences and 32,925 unique words from a couple of websites,” Ahia noted.

According to Ogueji who has been interested in working on languages since encountering Google Translate on his first android device in 2014, it was challenging developing the pidgin-to-English translation model

“This project was the first Natural Language Processing (NLP) project ever to be done on pidgin English by anyone,” he added.

Currently, Google Translate doesn’t have a pidgin to English facility. With a supervised learning model backed by more parallel data, Ogueji is confident their work could help the search giant be more inclusive of the 75 million Nigerians who speak Pidgin English.

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