Related papers: Toward verbalizing ontologies in isiZulu
The advancement of speech technology has predominantly favored high-resource languages, creating a significant digital divide for speakers of most Sub-Saharan African languages. To address this gap, we introduce WAXAL, a large-scale, openly…
Many attempts have been made in multilingual NLP to ensure that pre-trained language models, such as mBERT or GPT2 get better and become applicable to low-resource languages. To achieve multilingualism for pre-trained language models…
Unlike major Western languages, most African languages are very low-resourced. Furthermore, the resources that do exist are often scattered and difficult to obtain and discover. As a result, the data and code for existing research has…
We present NaturalOWL, a natural language generation system that produces texts describing individuals or classes of OWL ontologies. Unlike simpler OWL verbalizers, which typically express a single axiom at a time in controlled, often not…
Given that South African education is in crisis, strategies for improvement and sustainability of high-quality, up-to-date education must be explored. In the migration of education online, inclusion of machine translation for low-resourced…
Our goal is to create a convenient natural language interface for performing well-specified but complex actions such as analyzing data, manipulating text, and querying databases. However, existing natural language interfaces for such tasks…
Native speakers can judge whether a sentence is an acceptable instance of their language. Acceptability provides a means of evaluating whether computational language models are processing language in a human-like manner. We test the ability…
Language is a popular resource to mine speakers' attitude bias, supposing that speakers' statements represent their bias on concepts. However, psychology studies show that people's explicit bias in statements can be different from their…
Natural Language Interfaces and tools such as spellcheckers and Web search in one's own language are known to be useful in ICT-mediated communication. Most languages in Southern Africa are under-resourced, however. Therefore, it would be…
Voice or Speech Commands are a subset of the broader Spoken Word Corpus of a language which are essential for non-contact control of and activation of larger AI systems in devices used in everyday life especially for persons with…
While natural language understanding (NLU) is advancing rapidly, today's technology differs from human-like language understanding in fundamental ways, notably in its inferior efficiency, interpretability, and generalization. This work…
Processing low-resource languages, such as Kiswahili, using machine learning is difficult due to lack of adequate training data. However, such low-resource languages are still important for human communication and are already in daily use…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is increasingly used as a key ingredient in critical decision-making systems such as resume parsers used in sorting a list of job candidates. NLP systems often ingest large corpora of human text, attempting…
With the ever-growing generation of data for the Semantic Web comes an increasing demand for this data to be made available to non-semantic Web experts. One way of achieving this goal is to translate the languages of the Semantic Web into…
Stopwords are fundamental in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for information retrieval. One of the common tasks in preprocessing of text data is the removal of stopwords. Currently, while high-resource languages like English…
South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) present a complex linguistic landscape with languages such as Zulu, Sepedi, Afrikaans, French, English, and Tshiluba (Ciluba), which creates unique challenges for AI-driven translation…
We present a conversational model to apprise users with limited access to computational resources about water quality and real-time accessibility for a given location. We used natural language understanding through neural embedding driven…
Over the years, there have been campaigns to include the African languages in the growing research on machine translation (MT) in particular, and natural language processing (NLP) in general. Africa has the highest language diversity, with…
Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature,…
We rely on the strength of linguistic and philosophical perspectives in constructing a framework that offers a unified explanation for presuppositions and existential commitment. We use a rich ontology and a set of methodological principles…