Related papers: Improving Amharic Handwritten Word Recognition Usi…

Amharic is the official language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. There are lots of historic Amharic and Ethiopic handwritten documents addressing various relevant issues including governance, science, religious, social…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) can play a crucial role in enhancing the accessibility of spoken languages worldwide. In this paper, we build a set of ASR tools for Amharic, a language spoken by more than 50 million people primarily in…

Ethiopic/Amharic script is one of the oldest African writing systems, which serves at least 23 languages (e.g., Amharic, Tigrinya) in East Africa for more than 120 million people. The Amharic writing system, Abugida, has 282 syllables, 15…

This paper presents a manually annotated spelling error corpus for Amharic, lingua franca in Ethiopia. The corpus is designed to be used for the evaluation of spelling error detection and correction. The misspellings are tagged as non-word…

The Metaphone algorithm applies the phonetic encoding of orthographic sequences to simplify words prior to comparison. While Metaphone has been highly successful for the English language, for which it was designed, it may not be applied…

Multilingual retrieval increasingly underpins cross-lingual question answering and retrieval-augmented generation. Strong zero-shot scores on multilingual benchmarks are often taken as evidence that current encoders transfer reliably across…

Named Entity Recognition is an information extraction task that serves as a preprocessing step for other natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, information retrieval, and question answering. Named entity recognition…

The ambition of a character recognition system is to transform a text document typed on paper into a digital format that can be manipulated by word processor software Unlike other languages, Arabic has unique features, while other language…

This paper reports some difficulties and some results when using dense retrievers on Amharic, one of the low-resource languages spoken by 120 millions populations. The efforts put and difficulties faced by University Addis Ababa toward…

Question Answering (QA) returns concise answers or answer lists from natural language text given a context document. Many resources go into curating QA datasets to advance robust models' development. There is a surge of QA datasets for…

Text Summarization is the task of condensing long text into just a handful of sentences. Many approaches have been proposed for this task, some of the very first were building statistical models (Extractive Methods) capable of selecting…

Yor\`ub\'a is a widely spoken West African language with a writing system rich in tonal and orthographic diacritics. With very few exceptions, diacritics are omitted from electronic texts, due to limited device and application support.…

This survey delves into the current state of natural language processing (NLP) for four Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya, and Wolaytta. Through this paper, we identify key challenges and opportunities for NLP research in…

Machine translation (MT) systems are now able to provide very accurate results for high resource language pairs. However, for many low resource languages, MT is still under active research. In this paper, we develop and share a dataset to…

In this paper, we present an analysis of the first Ethiopic Twitter Dataset for the Amharic language targeted for recognizing abusive speech. The dataset has been collected since 2014 that is written in Fidel script. Since several languages…

This work explores fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for Amharic, a low-resource language, to improve transcription accuracy. While the foundational Whisper model struggles with Amharic due to limited…

We present Ethio-ASR, a suite of multilingual CTC-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models jointly trained on five Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromo, Sidaama, and Wolaytta. These languages belong to the Semitic, Cushitic,…

This paper describes the acquisition, preprocessing, segmentation, and alignment of an Amharic-English parallel corpus. It will be helpful for machine translation of a low-resource language, Amharic. We freely released the corpus for…

Arabic language is one of the most popular languages in the world. Hundreds of millions of people in many countries around the world speak Arabic as their native speaking. However, due to complexity of Arabic language, recognition of…

Neural retrieval and GPT-style generative models rely on large, high-quality supervised data, which is still scarce for low-resource languages such as Amharic. We release an Amharic data resource consisting of two datasets that supports…