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We address a notable gap in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by introducing a collection of resources designed to improve Machine Translation (MT) for low-resource languages, with a specific focus on African languages. First, we introduce…

The disparity in the languages commonly studied in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is typically reflected by referring to languages as low vs high-resourced. However, there is limited consensus on what exactly qualifies as a `low-resource…

Almost none of the 2,000+ languages spoken in Africa have widely available automatic speech recognition systems, and the required data is also only available for a few languages. We have experimented with two techniques which may provide…

Africa is home to over 2,000 languages from more than six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. These include 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research…

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…

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…

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…

Nigeria is a multilingual country with 500+ languages. Naija is a Nigerian Pidgin spoken by approximately 120M speakers and it is a mixed language (e.g., English, Portuguese, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo). Although it has mainly been a spoken…

Bangla is the 7th most widely spoken language globally, with a staggering 234 million native speakers primarily hailing from India and Bangladesh. This morphologically rich language boasts a rich literary tradition, encompassing diverse…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current…

Natural language generation (NLG) benchmarks provide an important avenue to measure progress and develop better NLG systems. Unfortunately, the lack of publicly available NLG benchmarks for low-resource languages poses a challenging barrier…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is rapidly transforming research methodologies across disciplines, yet African languages remain largely underrepresented in this technological shift. This paper provides the first comprehensive overview of…

This paper introduces AFRIDOC-MT, a document-level multi-parallel translation dataset covering English and five African languages: Amharic, Hausa, Swahili, Yor\`ub\'a, and Zulu. The dataset comprises 334 health and 271 information…

State-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models are trained on massive training corpora, and report a superlative performance on evaluation datasets. This survey delves into an important attribute of these datasets: the dialect of…

Most work in NLP makes the assumption that it is desirable to develop solutions in the native language in question. There is consequently a strong trend towards building native language models even for low-resource languages. This paper…

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant interest in natural language processing (NLP), particularly their remarkable performance in various downstream tasks in resource-rich languages. Recent studies have highlighted the…

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance in linguistic capabilities, robust multilingual evaluation has become essential for promoting equitable technological progress. This position paper examines over 2,000 multilingual…

Bangla, a language spoken by over 300 million native speakers and ranked as the sixth most spoken language worldwide, presents unique challenges in natural language processing (NLP) due to its complex morphological characteristics and…

While there are more than 7000 languages in the world, most translation research efforts have targeted a few high-resource languages. Commercial translation systems support only one hundred languages or fewer, and do not make these models…