Related papers: Mining Wikidata for Name Resources for African Lan…

In recent years, large-scale data collection efforts have prioritized the amount of data collected in order to improve the modeling capabilities of large language models. This prioritization, however, has resulted in concerns with respect…

With the success of large-scale pre-training and multilingual modeling in Natural Language Processing (NLP), recent years have seen a proliferation of large, web-mined text datasets covering hundreds of languages. We manually audit the…

MIRACL (Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages) is a multilingual dataset we have built for the WSDM 2023 Cup challenge that focuses on ad hoc retrieval across 18 different languages, which collectively encompass…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is today a very active field of research and innovation. Many applications need however big sets of data for supervised learning, suitably labelled for the training purpose. This includes applications for…

Language identification (LID) is a crucial precursor for NLP, especially for mining web data. Problematically, most of the world's 7000+ languages today are not covered by LID technologies. We address this pressing issue for Africa by…

We present DaMuEL, a large Multilingual Dataset for Entity Linking containing data in 53 languages. DaMuEL consists of two components: a knowledge base that contains language-agnostic information about entities, including their claims from…

This study examines the digital representation of African languages and the challenges this presents for current language detection tools. We evaluate their performance on Yoruba, Kinyarwanda, and Amharic. While these languages are spoken…

Large public knowledge graphs, like Wikidata, contain billions of statements about tens of millions of entities, thus inspiring various use cases to exploit such knowledge graphs. However, practice shows that much of the relevant…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly increased in size and apparent capabilities in the last three years, but their training data is largely English text. There is growing interest in multilingual LLMs, and various efforts are striving…

African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems --…

Recent advances in speech synthesis have enabled many useful applications like audio directions in Google Maps, screen readers, and automated content generation on platforms like TikTok. However, these systems are mostly dominated by voices…

Wikidata has been increasingly adopted by many communities for a wide variety of applications, which demand high-quality knowledge to deliver successful results. In this paper, we develop a framework to detect and analyze low-quality…

Online Knowledge Repositories (OKRs) like Wikipedia offer communities a way to share and preserve information about themselves and their ways of living. However, for communities with low-resourced languages -- including most African…

In the last 5 years, the availability of large audio datasets in African countries has opened unlimited opportunities to build machine intelligence (MI) technologies that are closer to the people and speak, learn, understand, and do…

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) has increased significantly with users frequently asking questions to chatbots. In the time when information is readily accessible, it is crucial to stimulate and preserve human cognitive abilities…

Pronunciation modeling is a key task for building speech technology in new languages, and while solid grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) mapping systems exist, language coverage can stand to be improved. The information needed to build G2P models…

Name-based gender classification has enabled hundreds of otherwise infeasible scientific studies of gender. Yet, the lack of standardization, proliferation of ad hoc methods, reliance on paid services, understudied limitations, and…

Encyclopedic knowledge graphs, such as Wikidata, host an extensive repository of millions of knowledge statements. However, domain-specific knowledge from fields such as history, physics, or medicine is significantly underrepresented in…

We introduce a new reading comprehension dataset, dubbed MultiWikiQA, which covers 306 languages and has 1,220,757 samples in total. We start with Wikipedia articles, which also provide the context for the dataset samples, and use an LLM to…

This paper describes the Dakshina dataset, a new resource consisting of text in both the Latin and native scripts for 12 South Asian languages. The dataset includes, for each language: 1) native script Wikipedia text; 2) a romanization…