Andargachew Mekonnen Gezmu

Andargachew Mekonnen Gezmu, Tirufat Tesifaye Lema, Binyam Ephrem Seyoum et al.

This paper presents a manually annotated spelling error corpus for Amharic, lingua franca in Ethiopia. The corpus is designed to be used for the evaluation of spelling error detection and correction. The misspellings are tagged as non-word and real-word errors. In addition, the contextual information available in the corpus makes it useful in dealing with both types of spelling errors.

Andargachew Mekonnen Gezmu, Binyam Ephrem Seyoum, Michael Gasser et al.

We introduced the contemporary Amharic corpus, which is automatically tagged for morpho-syntactic information. Texts are collected from 25,199 documents from different domains and about 24 million orthographic words are tokenized. Since it is partly a web corpus, we made some automatic spelling error correction. We have also modified the existing morphological analyzer, HornMorpho, to use it for the automatic tagging.

Andargachew Mekonnen Gezmu, Andreas Nürnberger, Tesfaye Bayu Bati

This paper describes the acquisition, preprocessing, segmentation, and alignment of an Amharic-English parallel corpus. It will be helpful for machine translation of a low-resource language, Amharic. We freely released the corpus for research purposes. Furthermore, we developed baseline statistical and neural machine translation systems; we trained statistical and neural machine translation models using the corpus. In the experiments, we also used a large monolingual corpus for the language model of statistical machine translation and back-translation of neural machine translation. In the automatic evaluation, neural machine translation models outperform statistical machine translation models by approximately six to seven Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) points. Besides, among the neural machine translation models, the subword models outperform the word-based models by three to four BLEU points. Moreover, two other relevant automatic evaluation metrics, Translation Edit Rate on Character Level and Better Evaluation as Ranking, reflect corresponding differences among the trained models.