ENGLISH TO LUGANDA AI PROJECT
* MACHINE LEARNING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MODEL
NAME: KISEJJERE RASHID
2ND YEAR BACHELORS OF SCIENCE IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
MAKERERE UNIVERSITY
KAMPALA, UGANDA
email: rashidkisejjere@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 transla-
tion 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 technics of
transfer learning. For this project, am to use the English to
Luganda dataset which was crafted by Makerere students the
dataset is made up of around 15000 sentences of English with
their respective translations.
Index Terms—machine translation, classification task, RNNs,
transfer learning, LSTMs, attention
I. I NTRODUCTION
Machine translation is a field that was and is still in the
research and so far there are multiple machine translation Ap-
proaches that researchers have come up with. These machine
translation techniques mainly include ;
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)
Next is the 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)
The last and best is the neural network translation system,
which 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.
II. DATASET DESCRIPTION
The dataset was created by fellow makererenians, it’s made
up of two columns, the first column includes sentences in
Luganda and the other includes their respective translations to
English. This is a textual dataset and it can be accessed from
the link: The creators of this dataset are: The major factors for
using this dataset include; There are very few datasets for the
English to Luganda dataset out there and this was the only free
dataset I could find. Even though it’s the only dataset, its data
is structured very well and its got minimal errors. The dataset
has got over 10000 Luganda sentences and their respective
translations to English and this type of dataset is capable of
creating accurate models.
III. AI PROJECT SCOPE
The goal is to create an AI Model with the ability to receive
English sentences from the user and be able to translate these
sentences into Luganda. I am to create multiple models with
different types of AI architectures till I get the best. Possible
constraints for this problem include insufficient memory re-
sources because this being an NLP problem, requires a lot of
processing power. So according to the wide vocabulary of the
dataset, the model is going to need a very big computational
power which might be a problem but fortunately, there’s
google colab that can be used to train a model on a free GPU.
A. ACCOUNTABILITY
In this context of AI, “accountability” refers to the
expectation that organizations or individuals will use to
ensure the proper functioning, throughout the AI systems that
they design, develop, operate or deploy, following their roles
and 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.
IV. STATEMENT OF THE AI PROJECT
Machine learning has improved a lot of Areas including
machine translation but so far this has been focussed on the
popular languages of Germany, French, and Africa wise the
most translated language is Kiswahili leaving languages such
as Luganda neglected. Luganda has a very big vocabulary so
coming up with a solution like this tends to ease on Translation
process for even other languages that have got a very big
vocabulary. So this project is a basis for more research that
can be made in Luganda.
V. AI RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Below is a list of famous research questions that are in the
field of machine translation.
• Does the model translate the English questions?
• How accurate is its translation?
• Which Machine translation model did you use?
• How long does it take to come up with its translation?
• How much space does the model need?
• What is machine translation?
• Who is to use the model?
• What is the environment of the AI model going to be?
• What is the attention mechanism used in NLP?
• What is RNN as used in NLP?
VI. HYPOTHESIS
Research hypothesis: it’s hypothesized that the model will
be able to translate any given English input into Luganda. The
model is a classification type of model to classify the given
output into their respective translations. The model will predict
its output based on a 15000 thousand sentenced dataset of
English words to Luganda. But in actual sense, there’s a very
big Vocabulary and since the bigger, the dataset the better and
also the more modifications that need to be made on the dataset
so for the sake of this paper am just going to be assuming that
the vocabulary size is of:
VII. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
The major aim of this paper Isn’t about creating a very
accurate model but it’s mainly about laying a foundation for
further research in this field, through the showing of the pre-
processing needed when implementing a machine translation
model on a dataset that has never been publically used before,
also showing all of the basic models that I can implement
regarding the translation of English to Luganda. And mainly
Creating a basis for any other implementations of Luganda-
related models.
VIII. PROPOSED AI METHODOLOGY
The methodology is to use is to come up with multiple mod-
els implemented with different types of architectures. These
architectures include SVMs, RNNs, Attention mechanisms,
and also transformers.
A. Data Collection
This refers to the process of collecting information from
different sources. So am to do this mainly by coming up with
many different Luganda sentences wit their respective English
Translations. The major sources of this kind of dataset is the
society.
B. Data Preprocessing
This is the process of cleaning, filtering preparing of the
colloected data and modifying it so as to make more easily
understandable to the computer. There major data preprocess-
ing tasks that am to apply are as below;
• Tokenization. Tokenization is referred to as a technique
that breaks up the words of a given sentence into numer-
ical values. Its usually the first step when preprocessing
text data during Natural Language Processing. This can
be done through the use of different algorithms that
handle tokenization.
• Spellings Errors Removal. Here the goal is to et rid of
any spelling errors that my ne in the text. Because the
for the model to be accurate, all of the inptted in must
all be accurate. ”Garbage In, Garbage Out.”
• Padding. The model is supposed to have data which is
of the same size and this is known as padding. WHich
is adding of extra zeros at the end of each text being
inputted into the text.
C. Model Training
This is a process of fitting the best combination of weights
and bias to a machine learning algorithm to minimize loss
function over prediction range. These process on NLP related
tasks most especially when using deep learning models usually
takes alot of time. But since this model is to be trained on
multiple different models, the training time will depend on
the complexity of the model.
D. Model Testing
This is the method of measuring the accuracy of the Model.
This happens when part of data is splitted into the train, test
and also the evaluation dataset. The test dataset is supposed
around a quarter of the entire dataset because the most of the
data is supposed to be used for the training process and the
few just used for the training part.
E. Evaluation
Model evaluation is the process of using different evaluation
metrics to understand a machine learning model’s perfor-
mance, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. This is a very
necessary part because through evaluation, you are able to
know all of the flows of the system and this part is uually
done as the last part model creation.
F. Overview
This AI model is a classification type of model. The classi-
fication of this problem has two ways in which it can resolve,
the first is through the use of a word-based classification
model and the other is through the use of a character-based
model. For the word-based classification model, its output is
the entire vocabulary of Luganda and the entire vocabulary is
very thus leading to the output also being very big meaning
that the Accuracy of this model would highly depend on the
preprocessing techniques, also training such a model would
require a very large computational power. For the character-
based model, its output would be character by character. the
major importance of such a model is that it won’t require a
very high computational power because it’s output won’t be
complicated but its downfall is that it would be limited to only
models that can store states and these are mainly deep learning
models of RNNs, LSTMs and their variants. Because it would
have to keep knowing the previous character for it to be able
to predict its next character.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special Thanks to Mr.Galiwango Marvin and Dr.Rose
Nakibuule for their determined and never ending guidance
towards my research and implementations of this project.
Avail-
at: