Phoneme-based English-Amharic Statistical Machine
Translation
Mulu Gebreegziabher Teshome (PhD)
IT Doctoral Program, Addis Ababa University University Joseph Fourier
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Email: mulu@ethiotelecom.et Email: laurent.besacier@imag.fr
AbstractThis research considers the application of Statistical
method to automatic Machine Translation (MT) from English
to Amharic. The research focuses on improving the translation
quality by applying phonemic transcription on the target side,
which is Amharic. Accordingly, the BLEU score results for the
phoneme-based EASMT system is 37.53% a gain of 2.21 BLEU
point from another baseline phrase-based EASMT with a BLEU
score result of 35.32%. This clearly shows that phoneme-based
translation outperforms the baseline system.
I. I NTRODUCTION
MT is the application of computers to translate text from
one natural language to another using computer generated in-
structions. The MT experiment is conducted between Amharic
and English languages. The two languages represent a wide
range of linguistic diversity and make the MT task challenging.
English, which belongs to Indo-European language family, is
the foreign language used in Ethiopia as a medium of instruc-
tion and communication in governmental, non-governmental,
regional and international organizations. Amharic on the other
hand belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic lan-
guage family spoken in Ethiopia. It is the ofcial language of
the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.
Amharic is the second most-widely spoken Semitic language
in the world after Arabic as noted by [1]. According to [1],
[2], Amharic is spoken as a rst language by more than 27
million people of the country. Amharic is also spoken by
many Ethiopians, outside the Amhara Region and the capital
city of Addis Ababa, as a second language. [1] also puts its
assumption that there are several million Ethiopian immigrants,
especially in North America and Israel that are native speaker
of Amharic. Studies show that English and Amharic are
disparate languages that makes translation very difcult. The
variation between English and Amharic languages is: Latin
vs. Geez script; consonant-vowel vs. syllabic characters; very
few vs. many orthographic characters; one-to-one vs. duplicate
phonemic characters; simple vs. complex morphology includ-
ing concatenate vs. non-concatenate word formation and stem
vs. root morpheme; word boundaries delimited with white-
space vs. no clear boundary between word and sentence; Latin-
based punctuation vs. Geez-based punctuation; Indo-Arabian
vs. Geez numbers; Date-Month-Year difference, and SVO vs.
SOV syntax.
Some of the mentioned variations such as syllabic characters,
duplicate phonemic characters and complex morphology that
are shown in Amharic brings about data sparseness and out-
978-1-4799-7492-4/15/$31.00 2015
c IEEE
Laurent Besacier (Prof.) Girma Taye (PhD)
and Dereje Teferi (PhD)
Grenoble, France: Addis Ababa University
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
of-vocabulary (OOV) problems. The phonemic variations in
Amharic that challenges the SMT system are those phonemes
that can be represented by more than one series of symbols.
For example, there are four distinct letter forms or graphemes
representing the /h/ sound (h M u ). These letters are all
audibly the same and are not separate phonemes. This brings
about data sparsity or OOV problem, as a single phoneme can
be represented by two or more symbols that are used as options
to write a given word.
The Allophonic variation in Amharic is another problem for
SMT. The allophones that pose problems to SMT are those
allophones called free variants. The free variant allophones in
Amharic language occur in identical position and are dialectics
that doesnt bring meaning difference, for example, [t] in
[t@b@l] and [s] in [s@b@l] are the same allophones that can be
used interchangeably. This is an indication that phonemes can
have too many allophone variants. Such allophone variation
similar to that of phoneme variants contributes to the data
sparseness that poses a problem to SMT.
Therefore, to determine whether we have different phonemes
or allophones of a single phoneme, the position of sounds
within words, distribution of sounds and phonemic or allo-
phonic variations are some of the challenges to the SMT
system. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to address
these problems.
Phoneme-based experiment combined with normalization and
segmentation using Morfessor by [10] minimizes and solves
the data sparseness and OOV problems. The phoneme-based
experiment has been conducted in order to address the syllabic
character variation that are shown on the target side, which
is the Amharic. Since the experiment is made between the
Amharic and English languages, the Amharic syllables have
to be converted to consonant and vowel combinations similar
to that of the English language. Therefore, a phoneme-based
EASMT is built by converting the Amharic Syllables to
Phoneme-based characters. The conversion methodology is
grapheme-to-phoneme applied for all Amharic corpora includ-
ing the Language Model (LM), the training, the tuning and the
reference.
II. L ITERATURE REVIEW
Phoneme is the basic and smallest distinctive unit sound,
which may bring about a change of meaning, in the sound
system of a specic language as dened by [4], [6], [7].
A given sound is called unit if a different word cannot be
formed by replacing part of the sound with another different
sound. For example, the word cat in the English language
can be divided in to three phonemes corresponding to the
letters /c/, /a/ and /t/. The three are unit sounds and each
of them can not be further divided in to parts. Two sounds
are called distinctive if interchanging the two sounds change
the meaning of a given word. Changing a single phoneme
in the word cat is sufcient to make a word which is
recognizably different to a speaker of English. Replacing the
phoneme /c/ in [cat] to /b/ brings about a change in meaning
making it different word. The word [bat] is different from the
word [cat] and are recognizably different words to an English
speaker. Similarly, the two paired Amharic words [r] [har]
for silk vs. [r] [sar] for grass are examples of distinctive
unit sounds in Amharic.
Amharic has thirty-nine phonemes, out of which, seven are
vowel phonemes while thirty-two are consonant phonemes.
According to [5], it was [9] who noted that there is no
agreement among scholars about the number of phonemes
in Amharic. The total number of phonemes is put in the
range from 22-34 in many literature. The debate is whether to
consider the labialized and palatalised consonants as phonemes
or not, as shown in Table I.
Labial Consonants k w , hw , k w , g w
Palatal Consonants S, , Z , ,
Table I. A MHARIC L ABIAL AND PALATAL C ONSONANTS
Due to the reasons to be discussed shortly, the total number of
consonant phonemes, including the labialized and palatalised
consonants we use in our experiment is 32.
The symbols that represent consonant phonemes can be di-
vided in to two. The rst group are the twenty-eight basic
consonant phonemes that have each seven separate symbols
based on the combined vowels. These consonant phonemes,
are listed in the traditional order in Table II. The second group
are the four labialized phonemes, which are listed in Table I,
that are formed by lip-rounding and releasing. The Labialized
consonants have each ve separate symbols combined with
only ve of the seven regular vowels as shown in the column
labelled Vowels (Labial) in Table II.
Consonants /h/, /l/, /m/, /s/, /r/, /S/, /k  /, /b/, /t/,
//, /n/, //, /k/, /w/, /P/, /z/, /Z/, /y/,
/d/, //, /g/, /t /, //, /p /, /s /, /f /,
/p/, /v/
Regular /@/,/u/, /i/, /a/, /e/,/1/, /o/
Vowels
// // // // // // //
Vowels /@/, /i/, /a/, /e/, /1/
(Labial)
// // // // //
Table II. A MHARIC C ONSONANT AND VOWEL P HONEMES
The symbols that represent the regular Amharic vowels, again
in the traditional order along with their equivalent Geez
transcription are shown in Table II. Since // /1/ is epenthetic
vowel, it can be added to make pronunciation easier or it can
be omitted.
In most literature, with the exception of [3], the consonant
phoneme /v/ sound, which is found in words of foreign origin
is not counted as one among the Amharic phonemes, as in
[1], or is omitted altogether as in [4]. The justication given
is that this phoneme is used in foreign-loaned words as pointed
out by [1]. But this is not the only phoneme that is used in
foreign-loan words. There are other two phonemes /p / and /p/
that are used in foreign-loan words mostly adopted to Amharic
like [s] [Petros] for P eter, [ws] [Pawlos] for
P aulus. Of course the consonant phoneme /v/ is also used
in words of foreign origin such as the // /vi/ in [n]
[televiZn] for television or in [m.y.] [Pe.Paye.vi] for
HIV and the // /va/ in [n] [vayolin] for violin.
Phoneme /v/ is not poor in lexicon and even more richer than
the phoneme /p /, which is even harder to nd lexicons in the
dictionary. Therefore, phoneme /v/ should be included with the
rest of Amharic phonemes but not to be omitted or treated as
an additional phoneme.
The distinguishing feature of consonants in Amharic is the
presence of ejective and labialized sounds. The ejective con-
sonant phonemes that doesnt occur in English language are
/k  /, /t /, //, /p /, /s / produced with the root of the tongue
retracted. Most phonemes, with the exception of /w/, /P/, /y/,
/j/ and /p/, have at least one labialized sound formed by
/w a/. The phoneme /P/, has one labialized sound formed by
/w @/. These are allophones to their corresponding consonant
phonemes realized when they are followed by two consecutive
vowel phonemes. In most cases, the consonant phoneme is
realized when followed by the vowel [u] followed by another
vowel like [a]. Some of these allophones are formed by the
sequence of [ua] vowels as in [] [lw a] for lua, [] [mw a]
for mua, [] [sw a] for sua, [] [rw a] for rua . . ..
However, the phoneme /k w /, /hw /, /k w / and /g w / have about
ve labialized variants that are treated as a one-unit phoneme
not as allophones. Three of them /k w /, /k w / and /g w / are
considered by [4] as a one-unit phonemes while [3] takes all
four including /hw / as separate phonemes. These labialized
phonemes unlike the other labialized characters appear in roots
and they occur word-initially where sequences of consonants
are absent in Amharic according to [3]. These phonemes
have more characters and are relatively common than the rest
labialized characters as [3] further claries the reason that
makes these labialized characters as phonemes.
III. E XPERIMENT
SMT systems require training on bilingual corpora. The
English-Amharic parallel corpus from parliamentary docu-
ments, which have been used in the previous phrase-based
baseline preliminary experiment by [8], are used for the
phoneme-based EASMT experiment as well.
A. Size of the parallel corpus
A total of 18,432 English sentences aligned with Amharic
sentences have been used for this experiment. Out of the total
collected data, 90% or 16,432 randomly selected sentence pairs
have been used for training while the remaining 10% or 2,000
sentence pairs are equally divided for tuning and testing. Thus,
the experiment is developed using a total of 18,432 English-
Amharic bilingual parallel sentences and 254,649 monolingual
sentences. The monolingual corpus is used for the LM. The
LM corpus contains those data related to parliamentary corpora
that are not included in the bilingual corpora and news corpora
collected from the Ethiopian News Agency. Our previous
preliminary experiment in [8] provides the detail counts in the
data sets at sentence, token and vocabulary level used in the
experiment. More information about the data acquisition, doc-
ument aligning, tokenization, sentence splitting and sentence
alignment is also discussed in detail in our previous experiment
as shown in [8].
B. Phoneme-based segmentation
The phoneme-based segmentation is capable to segment
at word boundaries in the Amharic orthography. The syllable
symbols change at the boundary due to the nearby attached
inectional markers such as gender, number, possessive,
person, tense, denite and other markers. The solution is to
use phoneme segmentation by converting each syllable to a
consonant-vowel character so that all phoneme symbols at
word boundary become similar. This is just like transliterating
the Amharic Geez-based script to English characters of
consonant-vowel combination. The difference between the
two is that both do not share the same script as Amharic uses
Geez script while English uses Latin script.
In order to illustrate the boundary level segmentation, Table
III can be a good example to show how segmenting using
phoneme-based contributes to solve the problem of data
sparseness and OOV than using the orthographic-based
characters. The vocabularies shown under the rst column
heading Orthography in Table III are selected from the
list of LM used in the experiment and those under the
second column heading Phoneme are taken after the LM
is converted to phoneme based LM. As can be seen from
the table in column one, all vocabularies in the rst column
have four syllables in common and can be extended to
ve. The fth syllable in all vocabularies are not similar as
they appear at the boundary that exhibit a change due to
number, gender, conjunction, possessive and other phoneme
additions. It is possible to reduce all words to [t + Amharic orthography has 238 major characters. There are also
morpheme] [halan@t + morpheme] as shown in the last
column heading Final Output. But this is only possible
if a grapheme-to-phoneme transcription is applied rst to
all words then conduct the segmentation and nally back to
the syllable by applying the reverse phoneme-to-grapheme
transcription to get the nal output as shown in the last
column.
The phoneme-to-grapheme transcription helps the segmenter
to have more options so that rare words that can be segmented
starting from the range at the 3rd position up to 4th be
extended to the 5th position as well. It is highly luckily to
get more rare words segmented at the fth position as in
the nal column in Table III than at the 4th position as in
the rst column. This clearly shows that the segmentation
of morphemes using the phoneme-based contributes to
segment rare words. Each morpheme in the phoneme-based
segmentation listed under the Final Output column represent
morphemes in the Amharic language that indicate a stem plus
segmented morphemes for possession, plural and pronoun.
Thus, phoneme-based segmentation gives not only
segmentation that looks similar to the Amharic morphemes
but also provides us more options to segment Amharic
words as shown in Table III that shows the possibility of
reducing all ve vocabularies to one provided each appear
only once or twice in the list. However, if each vocabulary
is rich in frequency, Morfessor ignores the vocabulary by
considering these vocabularies as most frequent words that
are not candidates for segmentation.
C. Phonemic transcription
When a linguist records words as sequences of phonemes
as shown in Table IV, the result is termed a phonemic
transcription as dened by [6]. The English phoneme
transcription in Table IV is similar to [6] while that of the
Amharic is similar to [4]. This is to be distinguished from
orthographic transcription. The orthographic transcription
includes the customary spelling system of the language.
Table IV is an example that shows the same sentence in
orthographic and phonemic transcription. The rst two lines
are the orthographic and phonemic transcriptions for English
followed by two subsequent lines for Amharic.
D. Orthographic transcription
Orthographic transcription means the words are written
down using the customary spelling system or orthography of
the language. The Amharic writing system uses Geez syllable
or Geez alphabet called [l] [d@l] meaning letter, which
was adapted from Geez, the extinct classical language of
Ethiopia. It is a syllabic writing system and consonants and
vowels do not exist independently of each other. In other
words, there are syllabic symbols for every Amharic sound
and each symbol represents a whole syllable in the Amharic
orthography. These Amharic syllabic-based scripts are written
horizontally from left to right.
The total number of consonants in the Amharic orthography
is 34. Each consonant has seven orders or shapes or f orms
depending on the vowel added to the consonant. Thus, the
41 labialized variants for most of the consonants. [1] puts the
number lower at 37. However, the actual labialized symbols
found in the Amharic corpora indicates that the total number of
symbols are 41. This puts the complete list of characters in the
Amharic writing system as 279 by excluding the punctuations
and numbers or any other symbols if there are any.
The Amharic orthography also uses Geez number symbols
although the Hindu-Arabic numerals are more frequently used
as noted by [1]. However, in the publications of the ofcial
parliamentary documents, the Geez number is still in use for
writing Amharic content while that of Hindu-Arabic numbers
for writing the English content. Table V shows all the Geez
numbers used in Amharic writing.
The other distinguishing feature of Amharic orthography is
the punctuation characters that are used differ from that of
the Latin script based English Writing, although there is no
meaning difference in both writing systems. The Amharic
punctuation are taken from the Geez punctuation as shown
in Table VI.
The orthographic transcription that is used in our day-to-
Latin , ; : . :- ? !
Amharic , ; : ~ { ? !
Table VI. P UNCTUATIONS IN A MHARIC
day written communication is far simpler than a phonemic
transcription. However, both transcriptions convey the same
 Orthography Phoneme Possible Segmentation Final Output
+ tn hlfntn hlfnt + n t + n
+ hlfntn hlfnt + n t +
+ hw hlfntmw hlfnt + mw t + hw
+ n hlfntn hlfnt + n t + n
+ m hlfntm hlfnt + m t + m
Table III. S AMPLE A MHARIC S YLLABLE , P HONEME AND POSSIBLE PHONEME SEGMENTATION

Transcription Description
This is an orthographic transcription. This is an orthographic transcription.
/DIs Iz @ foU"nimIk trn"skIpS@n / This is a phonemic transcription.
yh { l f w This is an orthographic transcription.
yh fnmk f nw This is a phonemic transcription.
Table IV. P HONEMIC VS . ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTIONS

Hindu-Arabic 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 10000

Amharic 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ? @ A B C D
Table V. N UMBERS IN A MHARIC

information provided one knows the rules. The transcription
rules in any language claries how to interpret a given word.
For instance, there might be a time the phonemic and ortho-
graphic transcription looks the same. The rst words in both
lines for the Amharic example above looks like the same. This
is because each syllable that constitute the word are in the
6th order. The vowel sound of the 6th order, as mentioned
earlier is epenthetic and, of course, it can be omitted during
the phonemic transcription of Amharic words.
E. Amharic grapheme-to-phoneme conversion
The phoneme-based experiment is conducted by converting
each Amharic syllable to phoneme character. These characters,
including the input syllables and the output phonemes, are
all transcribed using Geez scripts. Let S be the set of all
Syllables in the Amharic orthography as dened in Table VII.
The converter recognizes S as any syllable in the Amharic
language to be converted to (CV ) for all Amharic syllables
where C is any Amharic consonant while V is any Amharic
vowel. Let C be the set of all Consonants in the Amharic
phonemic transcription and V be the set of all Vowels in the
Amharic phonemic transcription.
The conversion of the Amharic Syllables of any given le is
S = Any Amharic syllable, such as:
[ h . . . ]
[h@ hu hi ha he h ho l@ lu . . . ]
C = C S is any 6th order Amharic
consonant, such as:
[h l m s r . . . ]
[h l m s r . . . ]
V = Any Amharic vowel, such as:
[ ]
[Pw @ Pu Pi Pa Pe P Po]
Table VII. A MHARIC P HONEME T RANSCRIPTION
then performed with the help of Algorithm 1. The following
are some of the points taken into consideration before, during
and after the conversion process:
1) The labialized characters [ _ . . . ]
for [lw a mw a rw a sw a Sw a qw a . . . ] respectively, have
been left unchanged since they dont exhibit any
change at the boundary due to number, gender, and
other phoneme additions. For example, the labialized
syllable [] [bw a] in [n] [bw anbw a] for faucet
doesnt change when it is plural as in [nm]
[bw anbw awo] for faucets but the regular syllable
[t] [t1] in [t] [bet1] for house is changed to []
[to] as in [m] [beto] for houses;
2) All syllables S = C have been left unchanged. The
vowel that follows the Consonant C in the 6th order
is epenthetic and, therefore, it is omitted;
3) All syllables C = V have been left unchanged. If
they appear in the text they are treated just like any
other Consonants although we have dened them as
Vowels;
4) The phonemes /M u / /h/ and their families have
been changed to their corresponding phoneme in /h/
/h/, like wise /U/ /s/ is converted to /s/ /s/ and //
/s/ to // /s/.
Therefore, the result of converting the following Amharic
syllable sentence example:
w bt Mzb s
the converter would deliver the following Amharic Phoneme:
ywh hbt yhzb slmhn.
Where, each syllable in the rst sentence have been converted
to sequence of phonemes of consonants and vowels with the
exception of the 6th ordered syllables that are left unchanged.
Thus, the grapheme-to-phoneme matching is between one
grapheme and one or two phonemes. For example, Figure
1 shows the grapheme-to-phoneme association for the rst
Amharic word taken from the above example [w] [y@wha]
to /ywh/. The rst and third syllables are matched to two
phonemes while the one at the middle is matched to one
phoneme.
Similarly, all Amharic corpora mentioned earlier that are
 Input: he shall be punished with simple imprisonment not exceeding three months and ne
Output-P: syqrb qt k sst wr b mybl qll esrt en ne.
Output-S: rb q st r yl l est ne.
Output-M: rb q st r yl l est ne.
Reference: st r yl l est yl
Table VIII. A N EXAMPLE SHOWING P HONEME - TRANSLATION

Algorithm 1 Amharic Syllable to Amharic Phoneme conver- fully segmented. The output-P has more segmented word by
sion algorithm looking at this translation example compared to the syllable-
Require: An Amharic text transcribed using the Geez script based morpheme segmentation, which is the row indicated
Ensure: An Amharic text converted to Amharic phoneme of by Output-M . The segmented word in the syllable-based
pattern CV segmentation Output-M is missing the conjunction word
1:  Accepts an Amharic text le and and this indicates that segmentation based on phoneme
2: while File f is dened/valid do produces better result than segmentation based on syllables.
3: Open f
4: Read f V. C ONCLUSION
5: while line l is not EOF do Although developing a statistical machine translation sys-
6: Read l tem from English to Amharic is difcult due to the differences
7:  Replace each syllable S by Phoneme pattern CV that exist between the two languages, our experiment using
8:  using the syllable-phoneme conversion pair list the Amharic grapheme-to-phoneme conversion option has been
9: syllable S by Phoneme pattern CV successful in improving the translation process by solving the
10: for all line ln S do data-sparseness and OOV problem.
11: print ln Accordingly, the BLEU score result for the output of the
12: print newline phoneme-based system is 37.53, which is a gain of 2.21 BLEU
13: end for point from that of an experiment made by [8] using the baseline
14: end while phrase-based orthographic transcription score result of 35.32%.
15: end while This is a 6.26% percentage increase.
w
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For example, the word [st] [k@sost] for upto three is
segmented to [ st] [k@ sost], [yl] [b@mayb@lt] for
not exceeding is segmented to [ yl] [b@ mayb@lt]
and [est] [Psratna] for imprisonment and to [est
] [Psrat Pna]. The last word in the phonemic translation
contains the conjunction and and this sufx is also success-