David Adelani


2024

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SIB-200: A Simple, Inclusive, and Big Evaluation Dataset for Topic Classification in 200+ Languages and Dialects
David Adelani | Hannah Liu | Xiaoyu Shen | Nikita Vassilyev | Jesujoba Alabi | Yanke Mao | Haonan Gao | En-Shiun Lee
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Despite the progress in building multilingual language models, evaluation is often limited to a few languages with available datasets which excludes a large number of low-resource languages. In this paper, we create SIB-200—a large-scale open-sourced benchmark dataset for topic classification in 205 languages and dialects to address the lack of evaluation dataset for Natural Language Understanding (NLU). For many of the languages covered in SIB-200, this is the first publicly available evaluation dataset for NLU. The dataset is based on Flores-200 machine translation corpus. We annotated the English portion of the dataset and extended the sentence-level annotation to the remaining 204 languages covered in the corpus. Despite the simplicity of this task, our evaluation in full-supervised setting, cross-lingual transfer setting and prompting of large language model setting show that there is still a large gap between the performance of high-resource and low-resource languages when multilingual evaluation is scaled to numerous world languages. We found that languages unseen during the pre-training of multilingual language models, languages from under-represented families (like Nilotic and Altantic-Congo), and languages from the regions of Africa, Americas, Oceania and South East Asia, often have the lowest performance on our topic classification dataset. We hope our dataset %will encourages a more inclusive evaluation of multilingual language models on a more diverse set of languages.

2023

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XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages
Sebastian Ruder | Jonathan Clark | Alexander Gutkin | Mihir Kale | Min Ma | Massimo Nicosia | Shruti Rijhwani | Parker Riley | Jean-Michel Sarr | Xinyi Wang | John Wieting | Nitish Gupta | Anna Katanova | Christo Kirov | Dana Dickinson | Brian Roark | Bidisha Samanta | Connie Tao | David Adelani | Vera Axelrod | Isaac Caswell | Colin Cherry | Dan Garrette | Reeve Ingle | Melvin Johnson | Dmitry Panteleev | Partha Talukdar
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Data scarcity is a crucial issue for the development of highly multilingual NLP systems. Yet for many under-represented languages (ULs) — languages for which NLP research is particularly far behind in meeting user needs — it is feasible to annotate small amounts of data. Motivated by this, we propose XTREME-UP, a benchmark defined by: its focus on the scarce-data scenario rather than zero-shot; its focus on user-centric tasks — tasks with broad adoption by speakers of high-resource languages; and its focus on under-represented languages where this scarce-data scenario tends to be most realistic. XTREME-UP evaluates the capabilities of language models across 88 under-represented languages over 9 key user-centric technologies including ASR, OCR, MT, and information access tasks that are of general utility. We create new datasets for OCR, autocomplete, semantic parsing, and transliteration, and build on and refine existing datasets for other tasks. XTREME-UP provides methodology for evaluating many modeling scenarios including text only, multi-modal (vision, audio, and text), supervised parameter tuning, and in-context learning. We evaluate commonly used models on the benchmark. We release all code and scripts to train and evaluate models.

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Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages
Odunayo Ogundepo | Tajuddeen Gwadabe | Clara Rivera | Jonathan Clark | Sebastian Ruder | David Adelani | Bonaventure Dossou | Abdou Diop | Claytone Sikasote | Gilles Hacheme | Happy Buzaaba | Ignatius Ezeani | Rooweither Mabuya | Salomey Osei | Chris Emezue | Albert Kahira | Shamsuddeen Muhammad | Akintunde Oladipo | Abraham Owodunni | Atnafu Tonja | Iyanuoluwa Shode | Akari Asai | Anuoluwapo Aremu | Ayodele Awokoya | Bernard Opoku | Chiamaka Chukwuneke | Christine Mwase | Clemencia Siro | Stephen Arthur | Tunde Ajayi | Verrah Otiende | Andre Rubungo | Boyd Sinkala | Daniel Ajisafe | Emeka Onwuegbuzia | Falalu Lawan | Ibrahim Ahmad | Jesujoba Alabi | Chinedu Mbonu | Mofetoluwa Adeyemi | Mofya Phiri | Orevaoghene Ahia | Ruqayya Iro | Sonia Adhiambo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

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.

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Better Quality Pre-training Data and T5 Models for African Languages
Akintunde Oladipo | Mofetoluwa Adeyemi | Orevaoghene Ahia | Abraham Owodunni | Odunayo Ogundepo | David Adelani | Jimmy Lin
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this study, we highlight the importance of enhancing the quality of pretraining data in multilingual language models. Existing web crawls have demonstrated quality issues, particularly in the context of low-resource languages. Consequently, we introduce a new multilingual pretraining corpus for 16 African languages, designed by carefully auditing existing pretraining corpora to understand and rectify prevalent quality issues. To compile this dataset, we undertake a rigorous examination of current data sources for thirteen languages within one of the most extensive multilingual web crawls, mC4, and extract cleaner data through meticulous auditing and improved web crawling strategies. Subsequently, we pretrain a new T5-based model on this dataset and evaluate its performance on multiple downstream tasks. Our model demonstrates better downstream effectiveness over existing pretrained models across four NLP tasks, underscoring the critical role data quality plays in pretraining language models in low-resource scenarios. Specifically, on cross-lingual QA evaluation, our new model is more than twice as effective as multilingual T5. All code, data and models are publicly available at https://github.com/castorini/AfriTeVa-keji.

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AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages
Shamsuddeen Muhammad | Idris Abdulmumin | Abinew Ayele | Nedjma Ousidhoum | David Adelani | Seid Yimam | Ibrahim Ahmad | Meriem Beloucif | Saif Mohammad | Sebastian Ruder | Oumaima Hourrane | Alipio Jorge | Pavel Brazdil | Felermino Ali | Davis David | Salomey Osei | Bello Shehu-Bello | Falalu Lawan | Tajuddeen Gwadabe | Samuel Rutunda | Tadesse Belay | Wendimu Messelle | Hailu Balcha | Sisay Chala | Hagos Gebremichael | Bernard Opoku | Stephen Arthur
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Africa is home to over 2,000 languages from over six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. This includes 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research conducted on African languages. Crucial in enabling such research is the availability of high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce AfriSenti, a sentiment analysis benchmark that contains a total of >110,000 tweets in 14 African languages (Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yoruba) from four language families. The tweets were annotated by native speakers and used in the AfriSenti-SemEval shared task (with over 200 participants, see website: https://afrisenti-semeval.github.io). We describe the data collection methodology, annotation process, and the challenges we dealt with when curating each dataset. We further report baseline experiments conducted on the AfriSenti datasets and discuss their usefulness.

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP)
Sunipa Dev | Vinodkumar Prabhakaran | David Adelani | Dirk Hovy | Luciana Benotti
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP)

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Varepsilon kú mask: Integrating Yorùbá cultural greetings into machine translation
Idris Akinade | Jesujoba Alabi | David Adelani | Clement Odoje | Dietrich Klakow
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP)

This paper investigates the performance of massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) systems in translating Yorùbá greetings (kú mask), which are a big part of Yorùbá language and culture, into English. To evaluate these models, we present IkiniYorùbá, a Yorùbá-English translation dataset containing some Yorùbá greetings, and sample use cases. We analysed the performance of different multilingual NMT systems including Google and NLLB and show that these models struggle to accurately translate Yorùbá greetings into English. In addition, we trained a Yorùbá-English model by fine-tuning an existing NMT model on the training split of IkiniYorùbá and this achieved better performance when compared to the pre-trained multilingual NMT models, although they were trained on a large volume of data.

2022

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Pre-Trained Multilingual Sequence-to-Sequence Models: A Hope for Low-Resource Language Translation?
En-Shiun Lee | Sarubi Thillainathan | Shravan Nayak | Surangika Ranathunga | David Adelani | Ruisi Su | Arya McCarthy
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

What can pre-trained multilingual sequence-to-sequence models like mBART contribute to translating low-resource languages? We conduct a thorough empirical experiment in 10 languages to ascertain this, considering five factors: (1) the amount of fine-tuning data, (2) the noise in the fine-tuning data, (3) the amount of pre-training data in the model, (4) the impact of domain mismatch, and (5) language typology. In addition to yielding several heuristics, the experiments form a framework for evaluating the data sensitivities of machine translation systems. While mBART is robust to domain differences, its translations for unseen and typologically distant languages remain below 3.0 BLEU. In answer to our title’s question, mBART is not a low-resource panacea; we therefore encourage shifting the emphasis from new models to new data.

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Is BERT Robust to Label Noise? A Study on Learning with Noisy Labels in Text Classification
Dawei Zhu | Michael A. Hedderich | Fangzhou Zhai | David Adelani | Dietrich Klakow
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP

Incorrect labels in training data occur when human annotators make mistakes or when the data is generated via weak or distant supervision. It has been shown that complex noise-handling techniques - by modeling, cleaning or filtering the noisy instances - are required to prevent models from fitting this label noise. However, we show in this work that, for text classification tasks with modern NLP models like BERT, over a variety of noise types, existing noise-handling methods do not always improve its performance, and may even deteriorate it, suggesting the need for further investigation. We also back our observations with a comprehensive analysis.

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Findings of the WMT’22 Shared Task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages
David Adelani | Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam | Antonios Anastasopoulos | Akshita Bhagia | Marta R. Costa-jussà | Jesse Dodge | Fahim Faisal | Christian Federmann | Natalia Fedorova | Francisco Guzmán | Sergey Koshelev | Jean Maillard | Vukosi Marivate | Jonathan Mbuya | Alexandre Mourachko | Safiyyah Saleem | Holger Schwenk | Guillaume Wenzek
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

We present the results of the WMT’22 SharedTask on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. The shared taskincluded both a data and a systems track, alongwith additional innovations, such as a focus onAfrican languages and extensive human evaluation of submitted systems. We received 14system submissions from 8 teams, as well as6 data track contributions. We report a largeprogress in the quality of translation for Africanlanguages since the last iteration of this sharedtask: there is an increase of about 7.5 BLEUpoints across 72 language pairs, and the average BLEU scores went from 15.09 to 22.60.

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A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation
David Adelani | Jesujoba Alabi | Angela Fan | Julia Kreutzer | Xiaoyu Shen | Machel Reid | Dana Ruiter | Dietrich Klakow | Peter Nabende | Ernie Chang | Tajuddeen Gwadabe | Freshia Sackey | Bonaventure F. P. Dossou | Chris Emezue | Colin Leong | Michael Beukman | Shamsuddeen Muhammad | Guyo Jarso | Oreen Yousuf | Andre Niyongabo Rubungo | Gilles Hacheme | Eric Peter Wairagala | Muhammad Umair Nasir | Benjamin Ajibade | Tunde Ajayi | Yvonne Gitau | Jade Abbott | Mohamed Ahmed | Millicent Ochieng | Anuoluwapo Aremu | Perez Ogayo | Jonathan Mukiibi | Fatoumata Ouoba Kabore | Godson Kalipe | Derguene Mbaye | Allahsera Auguste Tapo | Victoire Memdjokam Koagne | Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng | Valencia Wagner | Idris Abdulmumin | Ayodele Awokoya | Happy Buzaaba | Blessing Sibanda | Andiswa Bukula | Sam Manthalu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Recent advances in the pre-training for language models leverage large-scale datasets to create multilingual models. However, low-resource languages are mostly left out in these datasets. This is primarily because many widely spoken languages that are not well represented on the web and therefore excluded from the large-scale crawls for datasets. Furthermore, downstream users of these models are restricted to the selection of languages originally chosen for pre-training. This work investigates how to optimally leverage existing pre-trained models to create low-resource translation systems for 16 African languages. We focus on two questions: 1) How can pre-trained models be used for languages not included in the initial pretraining? and 2) How can the resulting translation models effectively transfer to new domains? To answer these questions, we create a novel African news corpus covering 16 languages, of which eight languages are not part of any existing evaluation dataset. We demonstrate that the most effective strategy for transferring both additional languages and additional domains is to leverage small quantities of high-quality translation data to fine-tune large pre-trained models.

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MCSE: Multimodal Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings
Miaoran Zhang | Marius Mosbach | David Adelani | Michael Hedderich | Dietrich Klakow
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Learning semantically meaningful sentence embeddings is an open problem in natural language processing. In this work, we propose a sentence embedding learning approach that exploits both visual and textual information via a multimodal contrastive objective. Through experiments on a variety of semantic textual similarity tasks, we demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the performance across various datasets and pre-trained encoders. In particular, combining a small amount of multimodal data with a large text-only corpus, we improve the state-of-the-art average Spearman’s correlation by 1.7%. By analyzing the properties of the textual embedding space, we show that our model excels in aligning semantically similar sentences, providing an explanation for its improved performance.

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MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition
David Adelani | Graham Neubig | Sebastian Ruder | Shruti Rijhwani | Michael Beukman | Chester Palen-Michel | Constantine Lignos | Jesujoba Alabi | Shamsuddeen Muhammad | Peter Nabende | Cheikh M. Bamba Dione | Andiswa Bukula | Rooweither Mabuya | Bonaventure F. P. Dossou | Blessing Sibanda | Happy Buzaaba | Jonathan Mukiibi | Godson Kalipe | Derguene Mbaye | Amelia Taylor | Fatoumata Kabore | Chris Chinenye Emezue | Anuoluwapo Aremu | Perez Ogayo | Catherine Gitau | Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng | Victoire Memdjokam Koagne | Allahsera Auguste Tapo | Tebogo Macucwa | Vukosi Marivate | Mboning Tchiaze Elvis | Tajuddeen Gwadabe | Tosin Adewumi | Orevaoghene Ahia | Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende | Neo Lerato Mokono | Ignatius Ezeani | Chiamaka Chukwuneke | Mofetoluwa Oluwaseun Adeyemi | Gilles Quentin Hacheme | Idris Abdulmumin | Odunayo Ogundepo | Oreen Yousuf | Tatiana Moteu | Dietrich Klakow
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

African languages are spoken by over a billion people, but they are under-represented in NLP research and development. Multiple challenges exist, including the limited availability of annotated training and evaluation datasets as well as the lack of understanding of which settings, languages, and recently proposed methods like cross-lingual transfer will be effective. In this paper, we aim to move towards solutions for these challenges, focusing on the task of named entity recognition (NER). We present the creation of the largest to-date human-annotated NER dataset for 20 African languages. We study the behaviour of state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer methods in an Africa-centric setting, empirically demonstrating that the choice of source transfer language significantly affects performance. While much previous work defaults to using English as the source language, our results show that choosing the best transfer language improves zero-shot F1 scores by an average of 14% over 20 languages as compared to using English.

2021

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Preventing Author Profiling through Zero-Shot Multilingual Back-Translation
David Adelani | Miaoran Zhang | Xiaoyu Shen | Ali Davody | Thomas Kleinbauer | Dietrich Klakow
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Documents as short as a single sentence may inadvertently reveal sensitive information about their authors, including e.g. their gender or ethnicity. Style transfer is an effective way of transforming texts in order to remove any information that enables author profiling. However, for a number of current state-of-the-art approaches the improved privacy is accompanied by an undesirable drop in the down-stream utility of the transformed data. In this paper, we propose a simple, zero-shot way to effectively lower the risk of author profiling through multilingual back-translation using off-the-shelf translation models. We compare our models with five representative text style transfer models on three datasets across different domains. Results from both an automatic and a human evaluation show that our approach achieves the best overall performance while requiring no training data. We are able to lower the adversarial prediction of gender and race by up to 22% while retaining 95% of the original utility on downstream tasks.

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The Effect of Domain and Diacritics in Yoruba–English Neural Machine Translation
David Adelani | Dana Ruiter | Jesujoba Alabi | Damilola Adebonojo | Adesina Ayeni | Mofe Adeyemi | Ayodele Esther Awokoya | Cristina España-Bonet
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XVIII: Research Track

Massively multilingual machine translation (MT) has shown impressive capabilities and including zero and few-shot translation between low-resource language pairs. However and these models are often evaluated on high-resource languages with the assumption that they generalize to low-resource ones. The difficulty of evaluating MT models on low-resource pairs is often due to lack of standardized evaluation datasets. In this paper and we present MENYO-20k and the first multi-domain parallel corpus with a especially curated orthography for Yoruba–English with standardized train-test splits for benchmarking. We provide several neural MT benchmarks and compare them to the performance of popular pre-trained (massively multilingual) MT models both for the heterogeneous test set and its subdomains. Since these pre-trained models use huge amounts of data with uncertain quality and we also analyze the effect of diacritics and a major characteristic of Yoruba and in the training data. We investigate how and when this training condition affects the final quality of a translation and its understandability.Our models outperform massively multilingual models such as Google (+8.7 BLEU) and Facebook M2M (+9.1) when translating to Yoruba and setting a high quality benchmark for future research.

2020

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Transfer Learning and Distant Supervision for Multilingual Transformer Models: A Study on African Languages
Michael A. Hedderich | David Adelani | Dawei Zhu | Jesujoba Alabi | Udia Markus | Dietrich Klakow
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Multilingual transformer models like mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa have obtained great improvements for many NLP tasks on a variety of languages. However, recent works also showed that results from high-resource languages could not be easily transferred to realistic, low-resource scenarios. In this work, we study trends in performance for different amounts of available resources for the three African languages Hausa, isiXhosa and on both NER and topic classification. We show that in combination with transfer learning or distant supervision, these models can achieve with as little as 10 or 100 labeled sentences the same performance as baselines with much more supervised training data. However, we also find settings where this does not hold. Our discussions and additional experiments on assumptions such as time and hardware restrictions highlight challenges and opportunities in low-resource learning.

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Massive vs. Curated Embeddings for Low-Resourced Languages: the Case of Yorùbá and Twi
Jesujoba Alabi | Kwabena Amponsah-Kaakyire | David Adelani | Cristina España-Bonet
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The success of several architectures to learn semantic representations from unannotated text and the availability of these kind of texts in online multilingual resources such as Wikipedia has facilitated the massive and automatic creation of resources for multiple languages. The evaluation of such resources is usually done for the high-resourced languages, where one has a smorgasbord of tasks and test sets to evaluate on. For low-resourced languages, the evaluation is more difficult and normally ignored, with the hope that the impressive capability of deep learning architectures to learn (multilingual) representations in the high-resourced setting holds in the low-resourced setting too. In this paper we focus on two African languages, Yorùbá and Twi, and compare the word embeddings obtained in this way, with word embeddings obtained from curated corpora and a language-dependent processing. We analyse the noise in the publicly available corpora, collect high quality and noisy data for the two languages and quantify the improvements that depend not only on the amount of data but on the quality too. We also use different architectures that learn word representations both from surface forms and characters to further exploit all the available information which showed to be important for these languages. For the evaluation, we manually translate the wordsim-353 word pairs dataset from English into Yorùbá and Twi. We extend the analysis to contextual word embeddings and evaluate multilingual BERT on a named entity recognition task. For this, we annotate with named entities the Global Voices corpus for Yorùbá. As output of the work, we provide corpora, embeddings and the test suits for both languages.
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