English To Luganda Paper
KISEJJERE RASHID
line 2: dept. name
MAKERERE UNIVERSITY
2100711543
21/U/11543/EVE
rashidkisejjere0784@gmail.com
Abstract—English to Luganda Translation using different
machine classification models and deep learning. Their many
machine translation sources right now but there isn’t any
public English to Luganda Translation paper showing how the
translation process occurs. Luganda is a very common
language and it’s the mother language of Uganda. It has got a
very big vocabulary of words which means that working on it
requires a very big dataset. For the sake of this paper, am
going to be going through different machine-learning models
that can be implemented to translate a given English text to
Luganda. Because Luganda is a new field in translation so am
going to be experimenting with multiple machine learning
classification models of SVMs, Logistic regression models, and
many more, finally deep learning models of RNNs, LSTMs,
and also incorporating advanced mechanisms of Attention,
Transformers plus some additional techniques of transfer
learning.
Keywords—Artificial Intelligence, machine translation,
classification task, RNNs, transfer learning, LSTMs,
attention
I. INTRODUCTION (HEADING 1) (5 MARKS)
Machine translation is a field that was and is still in the
research and so far there are multiple machine translation
Approaches that researchers have come up with. These
machine translation techniques mainly include; Rule-Based
Machine Translation (RBMT), Statistical Machine Learning
(SMT), and Neural Machine translation (NMT).
A detailed explanation of these approaches is in the next
chapter. Machine translation is one of the major
subcategories of NLP as it involves a proper understanding
of two different languages. This is always challenging as
languages tend to have a very huge vocabulary so a lot of
computer resources are needed for a machine translation
system to come out as accurately as possible. Also, the data
used in the process is supposed to be very accurate and this
as result also tends to affect the accuracy of these models so
coming up with a very accurate model is very tricky.
Throughout this paper, I will be explaining how I was able
to come up with a couple of translation models using
different strategies of machine learning.
II. BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION
The background of ML translation comes from majorly
three translation processes I.e. the Rule Based Machine
Translation (RBMT), Statistical Machine Learning (SMT)
and Neural Machine translation (NMT)
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A. Rule Based Machine translation(RBMT)
Rule base machine translation (RBMT) as the name states
it’s mainly about researchers coming up with different rules
through which a text in a given can follow to come up with
its respective translation. It is the oldest machine translation
technique and it was used in the 1970s.
B. Statistical Machine Learning (SMT)
Statistical Machine translation (SMT) is an old
translation technique that uses a statistical model to create a
representation of the relationships between sentences,
words,
and phrases in a given text. This method is then applied to
a second language to convert these elements into the new
language.One of the main advantages of this technique is
that it can improve on the rule-based MT while sharing the
same problems.
C. Neural Machine Translation(NMT)
Neural network translation was developed using deep
learning techniques. This method is faster and more accurate
than other methods. Neural MT is rapidly becoming the
standard in MT engine development.
The translation of a given language to another different
language is a machine classification problem. This type of
problem can predict only values within a known domain. The
domain in this case could be either the number of characters
that make up the vocabulary of a given language or the
number of words in that given vocabulary. So this shows that
the classification model could be either word-based or
character based. I will elaborate more on this issue in the
next topics.
III. LITERATURE REVIEW
Translation is a crucial aspect of communication for
individuals who speak different languages. With the advent
of Artificial Intelligence (AI), translation has become more
efficient and accurate, making it possible to communicate
with individuals in other languages in real-time. There are
basically two major learning techniques that can be used ;
Supervised learning is a type of machine learning where
the model is trained on a labeled dataset and makes
predictions based on the input data and the labeled output.
Supervised learning algorithms have been used to train AI-
powered English to Luganda translation systems. The model
is trained on a large corpus of bilingual text data, which helps
it learn the relationships between English and Luganda words
and phrases. This allows the model to make predictions about
the Luganda translation of an English text based on the input
data. This is the famous type of machine learning and it
involves the famous deep neural networks.
Unsupervised learning is a type of machine learning
where the model is not trained on labeled data but instead
learns from the input data. Unsupervised learning algorithms
can also been used to develop AI-powered English to
Luganda translation systems. The model uses techniques
such as clustering and dimensionality reduction to learn the
relationships between English and Luganda words and
phrases. This allows the model to make predictions about the
Luganda translation of an English text based on the input
data.
In conclusion, AI-powered English to Luganda
translation has the potential to greatly improve the speed and
accuracy of translations.
A. Research Gaps
Below are some of the major research Gaps in the field
of machine translation.
 Limited Training Data: The quality of AI-powered
translations is heavily dependent on the amount and
quality of training data used to train the model.
Further research is needed to explore methods for
obtaining high-quality training data.
 Lack of Cultural Sensitivity: AI-powered translation
systems can produce translations that are
grammatically correct but lack the cultural sensitivity
of human translations. This can result in translations
that are culturally inappropriate or that do not
accurately convey the original message.
 Vulnerability to Errors of the machine learning
system. AI can only understand what it has been
trained on. So in cases where the input is not similar
to the data which it was trained on, AI then can easily
create undesired results.
B. Contributions of this paper.
a) One of the major aim of this paper is lay a foundation for
further and much more detailed research in the
translation of large vocabulary languages like Luganda.
Through showing the different machine learning
techniques that can be used ti achieve this.
IV. METHODOLOGY
The problem being investigated in this project is to
develop an AI-powered English to Luganda translation
system. The significance of this problem lies in the growing
demand for high-quality and culturally sensitive translations,
particularly in the field of commerce and communication
between English and Luganda-speaking communities.
The scope of the project is to develop an AI system that is
capable of accurately translating English text into Luganda
text, while also preserving the meaning and cultural context
of the original text.
To address this problem, the proposed AI approach is to
develop a neural machine translation (NMT) model. The
NMT model will be trained on the English and Luganda
parallel corpus dataset, and will use this data to learn the
relationship between the two languages.The AI process can
be summarized as follows:
Data Collection: Collect a large corpus of parallel text
data in English and Luganda.
Pre-processing: Pre-process the data to remove irrelevant
information and standardize the text.
Model Selection: Choose the neural machine translation
model that is best suited for the problem.
Model Training: Train the NMT model on the pr-
processed data.
Model Evaluation: Evaluate the trained model on a held-
out set of data to determine its performance.
Deployment: Deploy the trained model for use in a real-
world setting.
Continuous Improvement: Continuously evaluate the
performance of the model and make improvements as
needed.
The AI evaluation framework used in this project are the
accuracy metrics mainly. This is a major of how the model
will be able to translate a given text correctly.
In conclusion, the proposed AI approach for this project
is to develop a neural machine translation model that can
accurately translate English text into Luganda text while
preserving the meaning and cultural context of the original
text.
A. Dataset Description
The dataset I used was created by Makerere University
and it contains approximately 15k English sentences with
there respective Luganda translation. Below are the factors
for considering this dataset.
1) Scarcity of Luganda datasets. Luganda isn’t a
famous language world wide and it is mainly used in the
Country Uganda only so the only major dataset I could find
was this one.
2) Cost. The dataset is available for free for anyone to
use and edit.
3) The accuracy of the dataset isn’t bad at all so it is the
best option to use.
4) The dataset is relatively large and diverse enough to
be able to create a very good model out of.
B. Data Preparation and Exploratory Data Analysis.
Headings, or heads, are organizational devices that guide
the reader through your paper. There are two types: compone
nt heads and text heads.
Data preparation refers to the steps taken to prepare raw data
into improved data which can be used to train a machine
learning model. The data preparation process for my model
was as follows;
a. Removal of any punctuation plus any unnecessary spaces to each other.
this is necessary to prevent the model from training on a
large amount of unnecessary data.
b. Converting the case of words in the dataset to lowercase.
Since python is case-sensitive a word like “Hello” is
different from “hello”. to avoid this dilemma I had to
change the case.
c. Vectorization of the dataset. Vectorization is referred to
as the process of converting a given text into numerical
indices. This is necessary because the machine learning
pipeline can only be trained on numerical data.
d. Removal of null values. Here all the rows that had null
data had to be dropped because for textual data it is
very difficult to estimate the value in the null spot.
e. Those were the data preparation processes I used in the
model creation process.
Exploratory data analysis is referred to as the process of A correlation matrix for one of the sentences
performing initial investigations on data to discover
anomalies and patterns. Exploratory data analysis is mainly
carried out through the visualization of the data. Below are
the visualizations and their meanings;
A. Word Cloud
A word cloud is graphical representation of the words
that are used frequently in the dataset. This is important as it
shows that the model will highlt depend on those particular
words .

f. Sentence Lengths plots

Through these plots, we are ale to determine what should
all the sentences of the datasets be padded to because during
the training process they are all supposed to be of the same
length.

For the Luganda sentences

A. Correlation matrix.
This is a matrix showing the correlation of the different
values to each other. Plotting a 2d correlation matrix for the
entire dataset is almost impossible but what is possible is the
plot of a particular sentence. The matrix below shows the
correlation for a given sentence. Here the model will have to
pay a lot of attention to the words that are highly correlated

These figures show the maximum sentence lengths for the
English and the Luganda sentences receptively.
g. Box Plot
A box plot is visual representation that can be used to
show the major outliers in the dataset. Plotting a box plot for
the entire spot is also almost impossible but what is possible
is the plotting of the box plot for a particular sentence, this as
a result shows on the possible outliers in the sentence thus
the model during the training process ends up not paying a
lot of attention to those particular words.
Box plot for one of the sentences in the dataset
In a conclusion, data preparation and exploratory data
analysis are key steps in the creation of a very accurate
model.
C. AI model selection and optimization.
Throughout the project, I created three models. I.e one
with recurrent neural networks, the other with the attention
mechanism, and finally the last one with transfer learning on
the per-trained hugging face transformer model.
The recurrent neural network model was a simple model
that uses RNNs to translate the model. Its accuracy was very
bad because the vocabulary for the two languages was very
big. These types of RNNs are best for simple vocabularies.
The attention mechanism model. This happened to
be much much better compared to the RNN model. Attention
is a mechanism used in deep neural networks where the
model can focus on only the important parts of a given text
by assigning them more weights.
The other model I created used transformers.
Transformers are also deep learning models that are built on
top of attention layers. This makes them much more efficient
when it comes to NLP tasks.
D. AI model selection Accountability.
In this context of AI, “accountability” refers to the
expectation that organizations or individuals will use
toensure the proper functioning, throughout the AI systems
that they design, develop, operate or deploy, following their
rolesand applicable regulatory frameworks, and for
demonstrating this through their actions and decision-making
process (for example, by providing documentation on key
decisions throughout the AI system lifecycle or conducting
or allowing auditing were justified).
AI accountability is very important because it’s a means
of safeguarding against unintended uses. Most AI systems
are designed for a specific use case; using them for a
different use case would produce incorrect results. Through
this am also to apply accountability to my model by making
sure that Since my AI model mainly depends on the dataset.
Hence, it’s best to make sure that the quality of the dataset is
constantly improved and filtered. Because of any slight
modifications in the spelling of the words then the model’s
accuracy will decrease.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
I spitted the data into training and the validation set
below are the results;
The training accuracy is of 92% and the validation
accuracy is of 52%
Validation and Accuracy plot

Its clear that the model is over fitting the dataset but it’s
accuracy is still fairly good.
Attention plot
An attention plot is a figure showing how the model was
able to predict the given output.
Words that were predicted with a very high probability
are more coloured.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS
I hope this paper will give a basic understanding of the
different machine learning methods that can be used to create
a deep learning model capable of translating a given English
text into Luganda. The same idea can be used to translate
different languages.
The model currently is overfitting the dataset. One way to
overcome this is to increase the size of the data because the
dataset contains of only about 15k sentences. So for the
model to become much more accurate increasing the dataset
to about a million sentences will tremendously improve on its
accuracy.
Usage of other machine learning techniques like
transformers. The model illustrated above was based on the
attention mechanism of neural networks. Using the
transformers will improve the quality of the model even
more. Though transformers are usually complicated to use
instead fine tuning an already trained model is what I would
recommend, this is called transfer learning.
DATASET AND PYTHON SOURCE CODE (20 MARKS)
LINK to the Final Python Source Code -
https:://colab.research.google.com/drive1N_sRAxdf
tGIzqzeIMw3NF Y 9xClLk49f_
LINK to the used dataset -
https : //zenodo.org/record/5855017
LINK to the YouTube Video -
https : //youtu.be/RLXfM0iLQag
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Special Thanks to Mr.Ggaliwango Marvin for his never
ending support towards my research on this project. I also
want to appreciate Mrs. ------ for the provision of the
foundation knowledge needed for this project.
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