AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Empowering COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages

Despite the progress we have recorded in scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) models and evaluation data to several under-resourced African languages, it is difficult to measure accurately the progress we have made on these languages because evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics like BLEU that often have worse correlation with human judgments. Embedding-based metrics such as COMET correlate better; however, lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with a simplified MQM guideline for error-span annotation and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET, a COMET evaluation metric for African languages by leveraging DA training data from high-resource languages and African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-Roberta) to create the state-of-the-art evaluation metric for African languages MT with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (+0.406).

Towards A Sign Language Gloss Representation Of Modern Standard Arabic

Over 5% of the world's population (466 million people) has disabling hearing loss. 4 million are children. They can be hard of hearing or deaf. Deaf people mostly have profound hearing loss. Which implies very little or no hearing. Over the world, deaf people often communicate using a sign language with gestures of both hands and facial expressions. The sign language is a full-fledged natural language with its own grammar and lexicon. Therefore, there is a need for translation models from and to sign languages. In this work, we are interested in the translation of Modern Standard Arabic(MSAr) into sign language. We generated a gloss representation from MSAr that extracts the features mandatory for the generation of animation signs. Our approach locates the most pertinent features that maintain the meaning of the input Arabic sentence.