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

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 The research presented in this paper was made possible through the support of the VLIR-IUC-UON program and was partly funded by the SAWA BOF UA-2007 project. The first author is funded as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO). G. De Pauw (&) CLiPS, Department of Linguistics, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] G. De Pauw P. W. Wagacha School of Computing and Informatics, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya P. W. Wagacha e-mail: [email protected] G.-M. de Schryver Department of African Languages and Cultures, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] G.-M. de Schryver Xhosa Department, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa 123 Lang Resources & Evaluation (2011) 45:331–344 DOI 10.1007/s10579-011-9159-7