Related papers: Speech Resources in the Tamasheq Language

The success of large language models has driven interest in developing similar speech processing capabilities. However, a key challenge is the scarcity of high-quality spontaneous speech data, as most existing datasets contain scripted…

Yor\`ub\'a an African language with roughly 47 million speakers encompasses a continuum with several dialects. Recent efforts to develop NLP technologies for African languages have focused on their standard dialects, resulting in…

Research in NLP lacks geographic diversity, and the question of how NLP can be scaled to low-resourced languages has not yet been adequately solved. "Low-resourced"-ness is a complex problem going beyond data availability and reflects…

This paper summarizes the Interspeech2025 Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Model (MLC-SLM) challenge, which aims to advance the exploration of building effective multilingual conversational speech LLMs (SLLMs). We provide a…

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…

We develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for stories told by Afrikaans and isiXhosa preschool children. Oral narratives provide a way to assess children's language development before they learn to read. We consider a range of…

The rapid spread of misinformation through social media platforms has raised concerns regarding its impact on public opinion. While misinformation is prevalent in other languages, the majority of research in this field has concentrated on…

Over the years, there have been campaigns to include the African languages in the growing research on machine translation (MT) in particular, and natural language processing (NLP) in general. Africa has the highest language diversity, with…

We introduce the Mandarin-English Language Interview (MELI) Corpus, an open-source resource of 29.8 hours of speech from 51 Mandarin-English bilingual speakers. MELI combines matched sessions in Mandarin and English with two speaking…

This work aims to build a multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system for ten lower-resourced Turkic languages: Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Sakha, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Uyghur, and Uzbek. We specifically target the…

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…

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…

Audio-language models (ALMs) generate linguistic descriptions of sound-producing events and scenes. Advances in dataset creation and computational power have led to significant progress in this domain. This paper surveys 69 datasets used to…

This research introduces a comprehensive Bahasa text-to-speech (TTS) dataset and a novel TTS model, EnGen-TTS, designed to enhance the quality and versatility of synthetic speech in the Bahasa language. The dataset, spanning…

Translating to and from low-resource languages is a challenge for machine translation (MT) systems due to a lack of parallel data. In this paper we address the issue of domain-specific MT for Bambara, an under-resourced Mande language…

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…

Through this paper, we seek to reduce the communication barrier between the hearing-impaired community and the larger society who are usually not familiar with sign language in the sub-Saharan region of Africa with the largest occurrences…

Recent advents in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) have shown improvements in low-resource language (LRL) translation tasks. In this work, we benchmark NMT between English and five African LRL pairs (Swahili, Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo,…

Code-switching (CS), the alternation between two or more languages within a single conversation, presents significant challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Existing Mandarin-English code-switching datasets often suffer…

Recent significant improvements in speech and language technologies come both from self-supervised approaches over raw language data as well as various types of explicit supervision. To ensure high-quality processing of spoken data, the…