Related papers: A Focus on Neural Machine Translation for African …

Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neural network that can be jointly tuned to…

One of the challenges in a task oriented natural language application like the Google Assistant, Siri, or Alexa is to localize the output to many languages. This paper explores doing this by applying machine translation to the English…

We conduct an empirical study of neural machine translation (NMT) for truly low-resource languages, and propose a training curriculum fit for cases when both parallel training data and compute resource are lacking, reflecting the reality of…

Transformers have shown great promise as an approach to Neural Machine Translation (NMT) for low-resource languages. However, at the same time, transformer models remain difficult to optimize and require careful tuning of hyper-parameters…

ASR has achieved remarkable global progress, yet African low-resource languages remain rigorously underrepresented, producing barriers to digital inclusion across the continent with more than +2000 languages. This systematic literature…

While recent neural machine translation approaches have delivered state-of-the-art performance for resource-rich language pairs, they suffer from the data scarcity problem for resource-scarce language pairs. Although this problem can be…

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…

Based on 46 in-depth interviews with scientists, engineers, and CEOs, this document presents a list of concrete machine research problems, progress on which would directly benefit tech ventures in East Africa.

Language is an essential factor of emancipation. Unfortunately, most of the more than 2,000 African languages are low-resourced. The community has recently used machine translation to revive and strengthen several African languages.…

Multilingual neural machine translation (NMT), which translates multiple languages using a single model, is of great practical importance due to its advantages in simplifying the training process, reducing online maintenance costs, and…

This paper describes the acquisition, preprocessing, segmentation, and alignment of an Amharic-English parallel corpus. It will be helpful for machine translation of a low-resource language, Amharic. We freely released the corpus for…

While neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved state-of-the-art translation performance, it is unable to capture the alignment between the input and output during the translation process. The lack of alignment in NMT models leads to…

Evaluating machine translation (MT) quality for under-resourced African languages remains a significant challenge, as existing metrics often suffer from limited language coverage and poor performance in low-resource settings. While recent…

Code search is a task to find programming codes that semantically match the given natural language queries. Even though some of the existing datasets for this task are multilingual on the programming language side, their query data are only…

Decoder-only language models can be adapted to diverse tasks through instruction finetuning, but the extent to which this generalizes at small scale for low-resource languages remains unclear. We focus on the languages of South Africa,…

Large-scale multilingual evaluations, such as MEGA, often include only a handful of African languages due to the scarcity of high-quality evaluation data and the limited discoverability of existing African datasets. This lack of…

We take a step towards addressing the under-representation of the African continent in NLP research by creating the first large publicly available high-quality dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages, bringing…

Annotating a multilingual code-switched corpus is a painstaking process requiring specialist linguistic expertise. This is partly due to the large number of language combinations that may appear within and across utterances, which might…

Despite the growing variety of languages supported by existing multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) models, most of the world's languages are still being left behind. We aim to extend large-scale MNMT models to incorporate a new…

Over 800 languages are spoken across West Africa. Despite the obvious diversity among people who speak these languages, one language significantly unifies them all - West African Pidgin English. There are at least 80 million speakers of…