Abstract:
The paper demonstrates the feasibility and scalability of participatory research, with a case study on Machine Translation (MT) for African languages. The study implementation will lead to a collection of novel translation datasets, MT benchmarks for over 30 languages, with human evaluations for a third of them, while also enabling participants without formal training to make a unique scientific contribution. Benchmarks, models, data, code, and evaluation results are released at https://github.com/masakhane-io/masakhane-mt
