Related papers: Improving Yor\`ub\'a Diacritic Restoration

Dialectal Arabic is the primary spoken language used by native Arabic speakers in daily communication. The rise of social media platforms has notably expanded its use as a written language. However, Arabic dialects do not have standard…

This paper presents a novel Dialectal Sound and Vowelization Recovery framework, designed to recognize borrowed and dialectal sounds within phonologically diverse and dialect-rich languages, that extends beyond its standard orthographic…

Most of previous work on learning diacritization of the Arabic language relied on training models from scratch. In this paper, we investigate how to leverage pre-trained language models to learn diacritization. We finetune token-free…

We tackle the task of text-to-speech (TTS) in Hebrew. Traditional Hebrew contains Diacritics, which dictate the way individuals should pronounce given words, however, modern Hebrew rarely uses them. The lack of diacritics in modern Hebrew…

The progress of Natural Language Processing (NLP), although fast in recent years, is not at the same pace for all languages. African languages in particular are still behind and lack automatic processing tools. Some of these tools are very…

We propose a novel architecture for labelling character sequences that achieves state-of-the-art results on the Tashkeela Arabic diacritization benchmark. The core is a two-level recurrence hierarchy that operates on the word and character…

Visually grounded speech (VGS) models are trained on images paired with unlabelled spoken captions. Such models could be used to build speech systems in settings where it is impossible to get labelled data, e.g. for documenting unwritten…

Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational…

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…

Amharic is the official language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. There are lots of historic Amharic and Ethiopic handwritten documents addressing various relevant issues including governance, science, religious, social…

We propose a new architecture for diacritics restoration based on contextualized embeddings, namely BERT, and we evaluate it on 12 languages with diacritics. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed error analysis on Czech, a morphologically rich…

Training data for machine learning models can come from many different sources, which can be of dubious quality. For resource-rich languages like English, there is a lot of data available, so we can afford to throw out the dubious data. For…

This paper investigates the performance of massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) systems in translating Yor\`ub\'a greetings ($\varepsilon$ k\'u [MASK]), which are a big part of Yor\`ub\'a language and culture, into…

The paper describes in detail the recovery effort of one of the official MediaWiki grammars. Over two hundred grammar transformation steps are reported and annotated, leading to delivery of a level 2 grammar, semi-automatically extracted…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) can play a crucial role in enhancing the accessibility of spoken languages worldwide. In this paper, we build a set of ASR tools for Amharic, a language spoken by more than 50 million people primarily in…

This study uses a character level neural machine translation approach trained on a long short-term memory-based bi-directional recurrent neural network architecture for diacritization of Medieval Arabic. The results improve from the online…

Although Arabic is spoken by over 400 million people, advanced Arabic writing assistance tools remain limited. To address this gap, we present ARWI, a new writing assistant that helps learners improve essay writing in Modern Standard…

Ethiopic/Amharic script is one of the oldest African writing systems, which serves at least 23 languages (e.g., Amharic, Tigrinya) in East Africa for more than 120 million people. The Amharic writing system, Abugida, has 282 syllables, 15…

Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (mRAG) leverages cross-lingual evidence to ground Large Language Models (LLMs) in global knowledge. However, we show that current mRAG systems suffer from a language bias during reranking,…

Multilingual retrieval increasingly underpins cross-lingual question answering and retrieval-augmented generation. Strong zero-shot scores on multilingual benchmarks are often taken as evidence that current encoders transfer reliably across…