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.

Named Entity Recognition (NER), a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), has shown significant advancements for high-resource languages. However, due to a lack of annotated datasets and limited representation in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), it remains understudied and challenging for low-resource languages. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a data augmentation technique that generates culturally plausible sentences and experiments on four low-resource Pakistani languages; Urdu, Shahmukhi, Sindhi, and Pashto. By fine-tuning multilingual masked Large Language Models (LLMs), our approach demonstrates significant improvements in NER performance for Shahmukhi and Pashto. We further explore the capability of generative LLMs for NER and data augmentation using few-shot learning.

This paper presents Arabic named entity recognition models by employing the single-task and the multi-task learning paradigms. The models have been developed using character-based contextualized Embeddings from Language Model (ELMo) in the input layers of the bidirectional long-short term memory networks. The ELMo embeddings are quite capable of learning the morphology and contextual information of the tokens in word sequences. The single-task learning models outperformed the multi-task learning models and achieved micro F1-scores of 0.8751 and 0.8884 for the flat and nested annotations, respectively.

Sentiment analysis in natural language processing (NLP), endeavors to computationally identify and extract subjective information from textual data. In code-mixed text, sentiment analysis presents a unique challenge due to the mixing of languages within a single textual context. For low-resourced languages such as Tamil and Tulu, predicting sentiment becomes a challenging task due to the presence of text comprising various scripts. In this research, we present the sentiment analysis of code-mixed Tamil and Tulu Youtube comments. We have developed a Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) networks based models for both languages which further uses contextualized word embeddings at input layers of the models. For that purpose, ELMo embeddings have been trained on larger unannotated code-mixed text like corpora. Our models performed with macro average F1-scores of 0.2877 and 0.5133 on Tamil and Tulu code-mixed datasets respectively.

This paper adds to the available resources for the under-resourced language Urdu by converting different types of existing treebanks for Urdu into a common format that is based on Universal Dependencies. We present comparative results for training two dependency parsers, the MaltParser and a transition-based BiLSTM parser on this new resource. The BiLSTM parser incorporates word embeddings which improve the parsing results significantly. The BiLSTM parser outperforms the MaltParser with a UAS of 89.6 and an LAS of 84.2 with respect to our standardized treebank resource.