Related papers: Masakhane -- Machine Translation For Africa
The linguistic diversity across the African continent presents different challenges and opportunities for machine translation. This study explores the effects of data augmentation techniques in improving translation systems in low-resource…
Language technologies should be judged on their usefulness in real-world use cases. An often overlooked aspect in natural language processing (NLP) research and evaluation is language variation in the form of non-standard dialects or…
Language technologies contribute to promoting multilingualism and linguistic diversity around the world. However, only a very small number of the over 7000 languages of the world are represented in the rapidly evolving language technologies…
Hausa language belongs to the Afroasiatic phylum, and with more first-language speakers than any other sub-Saharan African language. With a majority of its speakers residing in the Northern and Southern areas of Nigeria and the Republic of…
Stereotype repositories are critical to assess generative AI model safety, but currently lack adequate global coverage. It is imperative to prioritize targeted expansion, strategically addressing existing deficits, over merely increasing…
Various efforts in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community have been made to accommodate linguistic diversity and serve speakers of many different languages. However, it is important to acknowledge that speakers and the content they…
These days different platforms such as social media provide their clients from different backgrounds and languages the possibility to connect and exchange information. It is not surprising anymore to see comments from different languages in…
While the NLP community is generally aware of resource disparities among languages, we lack research that quantifies the extent and types of such disparity. Prior surveys estimating the availability of resources based on the number of…
There are more than 2000 living languages in Africa, most of which have been bypassed by advances in language technology. Current leading LLMs exhibit strong performance on a number of the most common languages (e.g. Swahili or Yoruba), but…
Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are largely restricted to high- or mid-resource languages, and often evaluate performance on higher-order tasks in reasoning and generation. However, plenty of evidence points to the fact…
Despite being spoken by millions of people, Tigrinya remains severely underrepresented in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research. This work presents a comprehensive survey of NLP research for Tigrinya, analyzing over 50 studies from…
Low-resource languages serve as invaluable repositories of human history, preserving cultural and intellectual diversity. Despite their significance, they remain largely absent from modern natural language processing systems. While progress…
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.…
We present a survey covering the state of the art in low-resource machine translation research. There are currently around 7000 languages spoken in the world and almost all language pairs lack significant resources for training machine…
Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA have shown incredible proficiency at natural language processing tasks and have even begun to excel at tasks across other modalities such as vision and audio. Despite their success, LLMs…
The focus is on critical problems in NLP related to linguistic diversity and variation across the African continent, specifically with regards to African local dialects and Arabic dialects that have received little attention. We evaluated…
High-resource language models often fall short in the African context, where there is a critical need for models that are efficient, accessible, and locally relevant, even amidst significant computing and data constraints. This paper…
The dominance of colonial languages in African education and scientific communication limits how hundreds of millions of speakers of African languages access and produce scientific knowledge. A core obstacle is the lack of established…
This paper presents Yankari, a large-scale monolingual dataset for the Yoruba language, aimed at addressing the critical gap in Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources for this important West African language. Despite being spoken by…
The paper describes the University of Cape Town's submission to the constrained track of the WMT22 Shared Task: Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. Our system is a single multilingual translation model that…