Related papers: Toward verbalizing ontologies in isiZulu
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
For sensible progress in natural language processing, it is important that we are aware of the limitations of the evaluation metrics we use. In this work, we evaluate how robust metrics are to non-standardized dialects, i.e. spelling…
The critical lack of structured terminological data for South Africa's official languages hampers progress in multilingual NLP, despite the existence of numerous government and academic terminology lists. These valuable assets remain…
An important learning objective for computer science students is to learn how to formalize descriptions of real world scenarios in order to subsequently solve real world challenges using methods and algorithms from formal foundations of…
Subword segmentation is typically applied in preprocessing and stays fixed during training. Alternatively, it can be learned during training to optimise the training objective. In this paper we study the learning dynamics of subword…
What is here called controlled natural language (CNL) has traditionally been given many different names. Especially during the last four decades, a wide variety of such languages have been designed. They are applied to improve communication…
Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data to generate natural language, enabling them to perform tasks like text summarization and question answering. These models have become popular in artificial intelligence (AI)…
In the domain of unsupervised learning most work on speech has focused on discovering low-level constructs such as phoneme inventories or word-like units. In contrast, for written language, where there is a large body of work on…
Intent classification models have made a significant progress in recent years. However, previous studies primarily focus on high-resource language datasets, which results in a gap for low-resource languages and for regions with high rates…
Despite the widespread adoption of Large language models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities remain limited to a few high-resource languages. Additionally, many low-resource languages (\eg African languages) are often evaluated only on…
Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of natural language and constantly being added to a language. Owing to their non-compositionality and their ability to take on a figurative or literal meaning depending on the sentential context,…
We describe an algorithm for automatic classification of idiomatic and literal expressions. Our starting point is that words in a given text segment, such as a paragraph, that are highranking representatives of a common topic of discussion…
How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers.…
We construct a formal theory, which we call reflectica, whose language possesses the following properties of natural language: it is a self-reflecting language and an intensional language. By a self-reflecting language we understand an…
Despite the progress we have recorded in the last few years in multilingual natural language processing, evaluation is typically limited to a small set of languages with available datasets which excludes a large number of low-resource…
Building effective neural machine translation (NMT) models for very low-resourced and morphologically rich African indigenous languages is an open challenge. Besides the issue of finding available resources for them, a lot of work is put…
Low-resource African languages remain underrepresented in sentiment analysis, limiting both lexical coverage and the performance of multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. This study proposes TriLex, a three-stage retrieval…
Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (1) the words of natural human language…
Languages typically provide more than one grammatical construction to express certain types of messages. A speaker's choice of construction is known to depend on multiple factors, including the choice of main verb -- a phenomenon known as…
For many of the 700 million illiterate people around the world, speech recognition technology could provide a bridge to valuable information and services. Yet, those most in need of this technology are often the most underserved by it. In…