This paper presents the Esethu Framework, a sustainable data curation framework specifically designed to empower local communities and ensure equitable benefit-sharing from their linguistic resource. This framework is supported by the Esethu license, a novel community-centric data license. As a proof of concept, we introduce the Vuk’uzenzele isiXhosa Speech Dataset (ViXSD), an open-source corpus developed under the Esethu Framework and License. The dataset, containing read speech from native isiXhosa speakers enriched with demographic and linguistic metadata, demonstrates how community-driven licensing and curation principles can bridge resource gaps in automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages while safeguarding the interests of data creators. We describe the framework guiding dataset development, outline the Esethu license provisions, present the methodology for ViXSD, and present ASR experiments validating ViXSD’s usability in building and refining voice-driven applications for isiXhosa.

Homophone normalization–where characters that have the same sound in a writing script are mapped to one character–is a pre-processing step applied in Amharic Natural Language Processing (NLP) literature. While this may improve performance reported by automatic metrics, it also results in models that are unable to effectively process different forms of writing in a single language. Further, there might be impacts in transfer learning, where models trained on normalized data do not generalize well to other languages. In this paper, we experiment with monolingual training and cross-lingual transfer to understand the impacts of normalization on languages that use the Ge’ez script. We then propose a post-inference intervention in which normalization is applied to model predictions instead of training data. With our simple scheme of post-inference normalization, we show that we can achieve an increase in BLEU score of up to 1.03 while preserving language features in training.

Translating cultural content poses challenges for machine translation systems due to the differences in conceptualizations between cultures, where language alone may fail to convey sufficient context to capture region-specific meanings. In this work, we investigate whether images can act as cultural context in multimodal translation. We introduce CaMMT, a human-curated benchmark of over 5,800 triples of images along with parallel captions in English and regional languages. Using this dataset, we evaluate five Vision Language Models (VLMs) in text-only and text+image settings. Through automatic and human evaluations, we find that visual context generally improves translation quality, especially in handling Culturally-Specific Items (CSIs), disambiguation, and correct gender marking. By releasing CaMMT, our objective is to support broader efforts to build and evaluate multimodal translation systems that are better aligned with cultural nuance and regional variations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) powered with argentic capabilities are able to do knowledge-intensive tasks without human involvement. A prime example of this tool is Deep research with the capability to browse the web, extract information and generate multi-page reports.In this work, we introduce an evaluation sheet that can be used for assessing the capability of Deep Research tools. In addition, we selected academic survey writing as a use case task and evaluated output reports based on the evaluation sheet we introduced. Our findings show the need to have carefully crafted evaluation standards. The evaluation done on OpenAI‘s Deep Search and Google’s Deep Search in generating an academic survey showed the huge gap between search engines and standalone Deep Research tools, as well as the shortcomings in representing the targeted area.

The disparity in the languages commonly studied in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is typically reflected by referring to languages as low vs high-resourced. However, there is limited consensus on what exactly qualifies as a ‘low-resource language.’ To understand how NLP papers define and study ‘low resource’ languages, we qualitatively analyzed 150 papers from the ACL Anthology and popular speech-processing conferences that mention the keyword ‘low-resource.’ Based on our analysis, we show how several interacting axes contribute to ‘low-resourcedness’ of a language and why that makes it difficult to track progress for each individual language. We hope our work (1) elicits explicit definitions of the terminology when it is used in papers and (2) provides grounding for the different axes to consider when connoting a language as low-resource.

Large language models (LLMs) have received a lot of attention in natural language processing (NLP) research because of their exceptional performance in understanding and generating human languages. However, low-resource languages are left behind due to the unavailability of resources. In this work, we focus on enhancing the LLaMA-2-Amharic model by integrating task-specific and generative datasets to improve language model performance for Amharic. We compile an Amharic instruction fine-tuning dataset and fine-tuned LLaMA-2-Amharic model. The fine-tuned model shows promising results in different NLP tasks. We also explore the effectiveness of translated instruction datasets compared to the dataset we created. Our dataset creation pipeline, along with instruction datasets, trained models, and evaluation outputs, is made publicly available to encourage research in language-specific models.

Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. Ethiopian languages exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity, encompassing a wide array of scripts, and are imbued with profound religious and cultural significance. This paper introduces EthioLLM – multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Ge’ez, Afan Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya) and English, and Ethiobenchmark – a new benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. We evaluate the performance of these models across five downstream NLP tasks. We open-source our multilingual language models, new benchmark datasets for various downstream tasks, and task-specific fine-tuned language models and discuss the performance of the models. Our dataset and models are available at the https://huggingface.co/EthioNLP repository.

Recent research in natural language processing (NLP) has achieved impressive performance in tasks such as machine translation (MT), news classification, and question-answering in high-resource languages. However, the performance of MT leaves much to be desired for low-resource languages. This is due to the smaller size of available parallel corpora in these languages, if such corpora are available at all. NLP in Ethiopian languages suffers from the same issues due to the unavailability of publicly accessible datasets for NLP tasks, including MT. To help the research community and foster research for Ethiopian languages, we introduce EthioMT – a new parallel corpus for 15 languages. We also create a new benchmark by collecting a dataset for better-researched languages in Ethiopia. We evaluate the newly collected corpus and the benchmark dataset for 23 Ethiopian languages using transformer and fine-tuning approaches.

In this paper, we present a parallel Spanish- Mazatec and Spanish-Mixtec corpus for machine translation (MT) tasks, where Mazatec and Mixtec are two indigenous Mexican languages. We evaluated the usability of the collected corpus using three different approaches: transformer, transfer learning, and fine-tuning pre-trained multilingual MT models. Fine-tuning the Facebook m2m100-48 model outperformed the other approaches, with BLEU scores of 12.09 and 22.25 for Mazatec-Spanish and Spanish-Mazatec translations, respectively, and 16.75 and 22.15 for Mixtec-Spanish and Spanish-Mixtec translations, respectively. The results indicate that translation performance is influenced by the dataset size (9,799 sentences in Mazatec and 13,235 sentences in Mixtec) and is more effective when indigenous languages are used as target languages. The findings emphasize the importance of creating parallel corpora for indigenous languages and fine-tuning models for low-resource translation tasks. Future research will investigate zero-shot and few-shot learning approaches to further improve translation performance in low-resource settings.

This paper describes CIC NLP’s submission to the AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task on machine translation systems for indigenous languages of the Americas. We present the system descriptions for three methods. We used two multilingual models, namely M2M-100 and mBART50, and one bilingual (one-to-one) — Helsinki NLP Spanish-English translation model, and experimented with different transfer learning setups. We experimented with 11 languages from America and report the setups we used as well as the results we achieved. Overall, the mBART setup was able to improve upon the baseline for three out of the eleven languages.

African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems – those that retrieve answer content from other languages while serving people in their native language—offer a means of filling this gap. To this end, we create Our Dataset, the first cross-lingual QA dataset with a focus on African languages. Our Dataset includes 12,000+ XOR QA examples across 10 African languages. While previous datasets have focused primarily on languages where cross-lingual QA augments coverage from the target language, Our Dataset focuses on languages where cross-lingual answer content is the only high-coverage source of answer content. Because of this, we argue that African languages are one of the most important and realistic use cases for XOR QA. Our experiments demonstrate the poor performance of automatic translation and multilingual retrieval methods. Overall, Our Dataset proves challenging for state-of-the-art QA models. We hope that the dataset enables the development of more equitable QA technology.

This paper presents the creation of initial bilingual corpora for thirteen very low-resource languages of India, all from Northeast India. It also presents the results of initial translation efforts in these languages. It creates the first-ever parallel corpora for these languages and provides initial benchmark neural machine translation results for these languages. We intend to extend these corpora to include a large number of low-resource Indian languages and integrate the effort with our prior work with African and American-Indian languages to create corpora covering a large number of languages from across the world.

This survey delves into the current state of natural language processing (NLP) for four Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya, and Wolaytta. Through this paper, we identify key challenges and opportunities for NLP research in Ethiopia.Furthermore, we provide a centralized repository on GitHub that contains publicly available resources for various NLP tasks in these languages. This repository can be updated periodically with contributions from other researchers. Our objective is to disseminate information to NLP researchers interested in Ethiopian languages and encourage future research in this domain.

Detecting harmful content on social media plat-forms is crucial in preventing the negative ef-fects these posts can have on social media users. This paper presents our methodology for tack-ling task 10 from SemEval23, which focuseson detecting and classifying online sexism insocial media posts. We constructed our solu-tion using an ensemble of transformer-basedmodels (that have been fine-tuned; BERTweet,RoBERTa, and DeBERTa). To alleviate the var-ious issues caused by the class imbalance inthe dataset provided and improve the general-ization of our model, our framework employsdata augmentation and semi-supervised learn-ing. Specifically, we use back-translation fordata augmentation in two scenarios: augment-ing the underrepresented class and augment-ing all classes. In this study, we analyze theimpact of these different strategies on the sys-tem’s overall performance and determine whichtechnique is the most effective. Extensive ex-periments demonstrate the efficacy of our ap-proach. For sub-task A, the system achievedan F1-score of 0.8613. The source code to re-produce the proposed solutions is available onGithub

Africa has a very poor doctor-to-patient ratio. At very busy clinics, doctors could see 30+ patients per day—a heavy patient burden compared with developed countries—but productivity tools such as clinical automatic speech recognition (ASR) are lacking for these overworked clinicians. However, clinical ASR is mature, even ubiquitous, in developed nations, and clinician-reported performance of commercial clinical ASR systems is generally satisfactory. Furthermore, the recent performance of general domain ASR is approaching human accuracy. However, several gaps exist. Several publications have highlighted racial bias with speech-to-text algorithms and performance on minority accents lags significantly. To our knowledge, there is no publicly available research or benchmark on accented African clinical ASR, and speech data is non-existent for the majority of African accents. We release AfriSpeech, 200hrs of Pan-African English speech, 67,577 clips from 2,463 unique speakers across 120 indigenous accents from 13 countries for clinical and general domain ASR, a benchmark test set, with publicly available pre-trained models with SOTA performance on the AfriSpeech benchmark.

Language Identification at the Word Level in Kannada-English Texts. This paper describes the system paper of CoLI-Kanglish 2022 shared task. The goal of this task is to identify the different languages used in CoLI-Kanglish 2022. This dataset is distributed into different categories including Kannada, English, Mixed-Language, Location, Name, and Others. This Code-Mix was compiled by CoLI-Kanglish 2022 organizers from posts on social media. We use two classification techniques, KNN and SVM, and achieve an F1-score of 0.58 and place third out of nine competitors.

The goal of code-mixed language identification (LID) is to determine which language is spoken or written in a given segment of a speech, word, sentence, or document. Our task is to identify English, Kannada, and mixed language from the provided data. To train a model we used the CoLI-Kenglish dataset, which contains English, Kannada, and mixed-language words. In our work, we conducted several experiments in order to obtain the best performing model. Then, we implemented the best model by using Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), which outperformed the other trained models with an F1-score of 0.61%.

This paper describes our submissions for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022 shared tasks. We participated in 2 tasks: a) Task 4: Classification of Tweets self-reporting exact age and b) Task 9: Classification of Reddit posts self-reporting exact age. We evaluated the two( BERT and RoBERTa) transformer based models for both tasks. For Task 4 RoBERTa-Large achieved an F1 score of 0.846 on the test set and BERT-Large achieved an F1 score of 0.865 on the test set for Task 9.

In recent years, multilingual pre-trained language models have gained prominence due to their remarkable performance on numerous downstream Natural Language Processing tasks (NLP). However, pre-training these large multilingual language models requires a lot of training data, which is not available for African Languages. Active learning is a semi-supervised learning algorithm, in which a model consistently and dynamically learns to identify the most beneficial samples to train itself on, in order to achieve better optimization and performance on downstream tasks. Furthermore, active learning effectively and practically addresses real-world data scarcity. Despite all its benefits, active learning, in the context of NLP and especially multilingual language models pretraining, has received little consideration. In this paper, we present AfroLM, a multilingual language model pretrained from scratch on 23 African languages (the largest effort to date) using our novel self-active learning framework. Pretrained on a dataset significantly (14x) smaller than existing baselines, AfroLM outperforms many multilingual pretrained language models (AfriBERTa, XLMR-base, mBERT) on various NLP downstream tasks (NER, text classification, and sentiment analysis). Additional out-of-domain sentiment analysis experiments show that AfroLM is able to generalize well across various domains. We release the code source, and our datasets used in our framework at https://github.com/bonaventuredossou/MLM_AL.