MorisienMT: A Dataset for Mauritian Creole Machine Translation
In this paper, we describe MorisienMT, a dataset for benchmarking machine
translation quality of Mauritian Creole. Mauritian Creole (Morisien) is the
lingua franca of the Republic of Mauritius and is a French-based creole
language. MorisienMT consists of a parallel corpus between English and
Morisien, French and Morisien and a monolingual corpus for Morisien. We first
give an overview of Morisien and then describe the steps taken to create the
corpora and, from it, the training and evaluation splits. Thereafter, we
establish a variety of baseline models using the created parallel corpora as
well as large French--English corpora for transfer learning. We release our
datasets publicly for research purposes and hope that this spurs research for
Morisien machine translation.