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| title: README |
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| We present **AfriNLLB**, a series of lightweight models for efficient translation from and into African languages. AfriNLLB supports 15 language pairs (30 translation directions), |
| including Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Amharic, Somali, Zulu, Lingala, Afrikaans, Wolof, and Egyptian Arabic, as well as other African Union official languages such as Arabic (MSA), French, Portuguese, and Spanish. |
| Our training data covers bidirectional translation between English and 13 languages, and between French and two languages (Lingala and Wolof). |
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| AfriNLLB models are based on NLLB-200 600M, which we compress using iterative layer pruning and quantisation. |
| We fine-tuned the pruned models on parallel corpora we curated for African languages, employing knowledge distillation from a larger teacher model. |
| This project aims at enabling efficient deployment of translation models for African languages in resource-constrained settings. |
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| Our evaluation results demonstrate that AfriNLLB models achieve performance comparable to the baseline while being significantly faster. |
| We release two versions of the AfriNLLB models, a Transformers version that allows further fine-tuning and a CTranslate2 version for efficient inference. |
| Moreover, we release all the training data that we used for fine-tuning the baseline and pruned models to facilitate further research. |
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| AfriNLLB has been motivated by multiple goals: |
| - Gathering and curating bilingual training datasets for African languages |
| - Building lightweight MT models specialized in translating African languages, utilizing compression approaches such as pruning and quantization |
| - Open-sourcing the code, training data, and models we have created |
| - Sharing our approaches and lessons learned to facilitate future work in this area |
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| If you use any of **AfriNLLB** models, datasets, or approaches, please cite the following [paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09373): |
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|
| ```bibtex |
| @inproceedings{moslem-etal-2026-afrinllb, |
| title = "{A}fri{NLLB}: Efficient Translation Models for African Languages", |
| author = "Moslem, Yasmin and |
| Wassie, Aman Kassahun and |
| Gizachew, Amanuel", |
| booktitle = "Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on African Natural Language Processing (AfricaNLP)", |
| month = jul, |
| year = "2026", |
| address = "Rabat, Morocco", |
| publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", |
| url = "https://openreview.net/forum?id=hVJZNUZBur" |
| } |
| ``` |
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