Chris Chinenye Emezue author Femi Pancrace Bonaventure Dossou author 2020-jul text Association for Computational Linguistics Seattle, USA conference publication All over the world and especially in Africa, researchers are putting efforts into building Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems to help tackle the language barriers in Africa, a continent of over 2000 different languages. However, the low-resourceness, diacritical, and tonal complexities of African languages are major issues being faced. The FFR project is a major step towards creating a robust translation model from Fon, a very low-resource and tonal language, to French, for research and public use. In this paper, we introduce FFR Dataset, a corpus of Fon-to-French translations, describe the diacritical encoding process, and introduce our FFR v1.1 model, trained on the dataset. The dataset and model are made publicly available, to promote collaboration and reproducibility. emezue-dossou-2020-ffr 2020-jul 83 87