Related papers: Toward verbalizing ontologies in isiZulu

A movie that is thoroughly enjoyed and recommended by an individual might be hated by another. One characteristic of humans is the ability to have feelings which could be positive or negative. To automatically classify and study human…

Information forms the basis for all human behavior, including the ubiquitous decision-making that people constantly perform in their every day lives. It is thus the mission of researchers to understand how humans process information to…

Africa has over 2000 languages. Despite this, African languages account for a small portion of available resources and publications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is due to multiple factors, including: a lack of focus from…

Tamil, a Dravidian language of South Asia, is a highly diglossic language with two very different registers in everyday use: Literary Tamil (preferred in writing and formal communication) and Spoken Tamil (confined to speech and informal…

Modern speech synthesis techniques can produce natural-sounding speech given sufficient high-quality data and compute resources. However, such data is not readily available for many languages. This paper focuses on speech synthesis for…

Although researchers and practitioners are pushing the boundaries and enhancing the capacities of NLP tools and methods, works on African languages are lagging. A lot of focus on well resourced languages such as English, Japanese, German,…

Existential rules are an expressive knowledge representation language mainly developed to query data. In the literature, they are often supposed to be in some normal form that simplifies technical developments. For instance, a common…

State-of-the-art natural language processing systems rely on supervision in the form of annotated data to learn competent models. These models are generally trained on data in a single language (usually English), and cannot be directly used…

Slot-filling and intent detection are well-established tasks in Conversational AI. However, current large-scale benchmarks for these tasks often exclude evaluations of low-resource languages and rely on translations from English benchmarks,…

Human beings possess the most sophisticated computational machinery in the known universe. We can understand language of rich descriptive power, and communicate in the same environment with astonishing clarity. Two of the many contributors…

This paper introduces Swivuriso, a 3000-hour multilingual speech dataset developed as part of the African Next Voices project, to support the development and benchmarking of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies in seven South…

Language modelling is regularly analysed at word, subword or character units, but syllables are seldom used. Syllables provide shorter sequences than characters, they can be extracted with rules, and their segmentation typically requires…

For easier communication, posting, or commenting on each others posts, people use their dialects. In Africa, various languages and dialects exist. However, they are still underrepresented and not fully exploited for analytical studies and…

Human language is firstly spoken and only secondarily written. Text, however, is a very convenient and efficient representation of language, and modern civilization has made it ubiquitous. Thus the field of NLP has overwhelmingly focused on…

Machine learning techniques have conquered many different tasks in speech and natural language processing, such as speech recognition, information extraction, text and speech generation, and human machine interaction using natural language…

Pretrained language models (PLMs) for African languages are continually improving, but the reasons behind these advances remain unclear. This paper presents the first systematic investigation into probing PLMs for linguistic knowledge about…

Multilingual generative language models (LMs) are increasingly fluent in a large variety of languages. Trained on the concatenation of corpora in multiple languages, they enable powerful transfer from high-resource languages to low-resource…

African languages remain underrepresented in natural language processing (NLP), with most corpora limited to formal registers that fail to capture the vibrancy of everyday communication. This work addresses this gap for Shona, a Bantu…

Several widely used software applications involve some form of processing of natural language, with tasks ranging from digitising hardcopies and text processing to speech generation. Varied language resources are used to develop software…

In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link…