Paper presented at the NIPS 2018 Workshop on Machine Learning for the Developing World, December 2018, Montreal, Canada
Statistical machine translation techniques offer great promise for the development of automatic translation systems. However, the realization of this potential requires the availability of significant amounts of parallel bilingual texts. This paper reports on an attempt to reduce the amount of text that is required to obtain an acceptable translation system, through the use of active and semi- supervised learning. Systems were built using resources collected from South African government websites and the results evaluated using a standard automatic evaluation metric (BLEU). We show that significant improvements in translation quality can be achieved with very limited parallel corpora, and that both active learning and semi-supervised learning are useful in this context. In this paper, I draw on data collected from a research project carried out in four different regions of Kenya between 2006 and 2007, to provide and discuss results that examine the language perceptions that Kenyan youths in selected rural and urban areas exhibit. I also examine how such perceptions are reflected in their daily language practices and how they help in constructing their language identities. This paper utilizes both quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic methods of data collection that include the use of questionnaires, informal interviews and participant observations to capture and characterize language practices of the target population. Using these strategies I examine the discrepancy between speakers’ stated perceptions and their actual language performances and how this mismatch helps explain the meaning of the different identities speakers perform, enact or project. In the discussion, I underscore the importance of underlying met alinguistic phenomena responsible for the ambivalence evident among the youths that were studied. This is made possible through an eclectic sociolinguistic approach that examines different language ideologies at play. This approach and the questions raised in this paper ultimately contribute to a better understanding of the larger question of the state of language maintenance and shift in Kenya and the ever dynamic identities of youth language, which could be replicated in other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.