Related papers: Masakhane -- Machine Translation For Africa
Africa is home to over one-third of the world's languages, yet remains underrepresented in AI research. We introduce Afri-MCQA, the first Multilingual Cultural Question-Answering benchmark covering 7.5k Q&A pairs across 15 African languages…
Sentiment analysis is a fundamental and valuable task in NLP. However, due to limitations in data and technological availability, research into sentiment analysis of African languages has been fragmented and lacking. With the recent release…
Multilingual pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several downstream tasks for both high-resourced and low-resourced languages. However, there is still a large performance drop for languages unseen…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is undergoing constant transformation, as Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving daily breakthroughs in research and practice. In this regard, tracking the progress of NLP research and automatically…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in a wide range of natural language applications. However, they often struggle to recognize low-resource languages, in particular African languages, which are not well…
Neural models have drastically advanced state of the art for machine translation (MT) between high-resource languages. Traditionally, these models rely on large amounts of training data, but many language pairs lack these resources.…
We present mahaNLP, an open-source natural language processing (NLP) library specifically built for the Marathi language. It aims to enhance the support for the low-resource Indian language Marathi in the field of NLP. It is an easy-to-use,…
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa with a population of more than 200 million people. More than 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria and it is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Despite this, natural…
This survey provides a comprehensive catalog of publicly available text and speech resources for two West African languages: Hausa, an Afroasiatic language with approximately 80-100 million speakers, and Fongbe, a Niger-Congo language…
Marathi is one of the most widely used languages in the world. One might expect that the latest advances in NLP research in languages like English reach such a large community. However, NLP advancements in English didn't immediately reach…
The rapid evolution of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has favoured major languages such as English, leaving a significant gap for many others due to limited resources. This is especially evident in the context of data annotation, a task…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has made great advancements in recent years with major breakthroughs that have established new benchmarks. However, these advances have mainly benefited a certain group of languages commonly…
Developing Information Retrieval (IR) tools and techniques in African languages suffers from the dual problems of a lack of algorithms and very small test data collections. This affects the creation of practical IR systems and limits the…
Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks make use of massively pre-trained language models, which are computationally expensive. However, access to high computational resources added to the issue of data scarcity of African languages…
In this paper, we focus on the task of multilingual machine translation for African languages and describe our contribution in the 2021 WMT Shared Task: Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation. We introduce MMTAfrica, the first…
This paper describes Tencent's multilingual machine translation systems for the WMT22 shared task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. We participated in the $\mathbf{constrained}$ translation track in which…
Bangla is a language spoken by approximately 240 million native speakers and around 300 million people worldwide. Despite being the 5th largest spoken language in the world, Bangla is still a "low-resource" language, and existing pretrained…
This survey delves into the current state of natural language processing (NLP) for four Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya, and Wolaytta. Through this paper, we identify key challenges and opportunities for NLP research in…
The Bangla language is the seventh most spoken language, with 265 million native and non-native speakers worldwide. However, English is the predominant language for online resources and technical knowledge, journals, and documentation.…
In this paper, we introduce the first publicly available English-Kpelle dataset for machine translation, comprising over 2000 sentence pairs drawn from everyday communication, religious texts, and educational materials. By fine-tuning…