Related papers: AI4D -- African Language Program
Automatic speech recognition systems have undoubtedly advanced with the integration of multilingual and multitask models such as Whisper, which have shown a promising ability to understand and process speech across a wide range of…
Expanding the language coverage of speech technology has the potential to improve access to information for many more people. However, current speech technology is restricted to about one hundred languages which is a small fraction of the…
Millions of people in African countries face barriers to accessing healthcare due to language and literacy gaps. This research tackles this challenge by transforming complex medical documents -- in this case, prosthetic device user manuals…
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…
The improvement of computers' capacities, advancements in algorithmic techniques, and the significant increase of available data have enabled the recent developments of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. One of its branches, called…
Question-answering (QA) that comes naturally to humans is a critical component in seamless human-computer interaction. It has emerged as one of the most convenient and natural methods to interact with the web and is especially desirable in…
Emerging digital technologies are exacerbating the existing divide in Open Access Data (OAD) between high-and low-resource languages, excluding many communities from participating in the global digital transformation. In this PhD proposal,…
Current AI models often fail to account for local context and language, given the predominance of English and Western internet content in their training data. This hinders the global relevance, usefulness, and safety of these models as they…
Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved human-level performance on a range of professional and academic benchmarks. The accessibility of these models has lagged behind their performance. State-of-the-art LLMs require costly…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral to both research and daily operations, rigorous evaluation is crucial. This assessment is important not only for individual tasks but also for understanding their societal impact and…
In spite of the recent progress in speech processing, the majority of world languages and dialects remain uncovered. This situation only furthers an already wide technological divide, thereby hindering technological and socioeconomic…
The primary obstacle to developing technologies for low-resource languages is the lack of representative, usable data. In this paper, we report the deployment of technology-driven data collection methods for creating a corpus of more than…
Open coding, a key inductive step in qualitative research, discovers and constructs concepts from human datasets. However, capturing extensive and nuanced aspects or "coding moments" can be challenging, especially with large discourse…
Generative language modelling has surged in popularity with the emergence of services such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini. While these models have demonstrated transformative potential in productivity and communication, they overwhelmingly…
Spoken Language Models (SLMs) aim to learn linguistic competence directly from speech using discrete units, widening access to Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies for languages with limited written resources. However, progress…
In recent years, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have significantly improved, especially in languages with a vast amount of transcribed speech data. However, ASR systems tend to perform poorly for low-resource languages with…
Programming is a powerful and ubiquitous problem-solving tool. Developing systems that can assist programmers or even generate programs independently could make programming more productive and accessible, yet so far incorporating…
The development of open-source, multilingual medical language models can benefit a wide, linguistically diverse audience from different regions. To promote this domain, we present contributions from the following: First, we construct a…
We introduce _transparent documents_, interactive web-based scholarly articles which allow readers to explore the relationship to the underlying data by hovering over fragments of text, and present an LLM-based tool for authoring…
The Igbo language is facing a risk of becoming endangered, as indicated by a 2025 UNESCO study. This highlights the need to develop language technologies for Igbo to foster communication, learning and preservation. To create robust,…