Towards Building a Gender-Inclusive Khaya AI for English⇔Twi Text Translator
Abstract: We present a work in progress on how NLP Ghana is working on examining gender bias in the Khaya AI text translator. Khaya AI Text translator is the first text translator app for African languages. Currently, five languages are represented on the app; we focus on examining gender bias in the Twi→English and English→Twi machine translation to serve as the benchmark for the other African languages on the translator. NLP Ghana publicly released an open-sourced English-Twi Parallel corpus in 2021, which set a baseline for building the text translator to enable Twi Speakers and those in the Diaspora to communicate effectively from Twi to English or English to Twi. Upon testing some hand-crafted test set examples, we examine some representational and allocational gender biases depicting the stereotypical concept in the community. Building from efforts already done, like how Google Translate has worked on examining gender bias in the translation for specific languages, English, Spanish, French, Indonesia, etc., we present the first project to investigate gender bias in an African Language translator, Khaya AI. We set out guidelines to help with a participatory data collection approach from the data team and explore our models to help provide text translators free from such biases to serve the community.
Author bio: Abigail Oppong is the lead/Co-Investigator for AI ethics at NLP Ghana, part of the 2023 list for 100 Women in AI Ethics from the Women AI Ethics due to her work in examining gender in AI Applications for African AI systems. She is an early career researcher focused on AI ethics in the sector of health and communication and an enthusiast about fairness and ethics in Natural Language Processing. She is a young Ambassador for Ariel Foundation International under the United Nations, focusing on issues affecting youths and women in Africa and making the voices of African Youths heard. Changemaker, Young Activist, and a Social Entrepreneur. As a member of the Ghana Natural Language Processing group. Her research project is based on mitigating gender bias in NLP applications. Recipients of the "Young Leaders Creating a Better World for All award" at the Women Economic Forum, 2019. She has made several AFI publications that seek to speak, influence, and impact life. She is part of the Board Members of Women Media and Changes working hard to ensure young women's voices are represented well in digital media. She is also a Co-founder of Photo4her, an initiative that seeks to empower teenage mothers with photography skills. Currently, she is running a project called "The Level Her Up project" that aims to help female student entrepreneurs with the needed digital skills to thrive in managing their businesses while in their studies.
Recorded Presentation | 27 April 2023
#NLP #FeministApproaches #MarginalizedCommunities #Ghana
