Related papers: Comprehensive Benchmark Datasets for Amharic Scene…

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…

This research paper presents a part-of-speech (POS) annotated dataset and tagger tool for the low-resource Uzbek language. The dataset includes 12 tags, which were used to develop a rule-based POS-tagger tool. The corpus text used in the…

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.…

Hausa language belongs to the Afroasiatic phylum, and with more first-language speakers than any other sub-Saharan African language. With a majority of its speakers residing in the Northern and Southern areas of Nigeria and the Republic of…

We present ADI-20, an extension of the previously published ADI-17 Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) dataset. ADI-20 covers all Arabic-speaking countries' dialects. It comprises 3,556 hours from 19 Arabic dialects in addition to Modern…

This study thoroughly investigates how well deep learning models can recognize Arabic handwritten text for person biometric identification. It compares three advanced architectures -- ResNet50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetB7 -- using three…

The Houma Alliance Book, one of history's earliest calligraphic examples, was unearthed in the 1970s. These artifacts were meticulously organized, reproduced, and copied by the Shanxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics. However,…

With the rise of generative text-to-speech models, distinguishing between real and synthetic speech has become challenging, especially for Arabic that have received limited research attention. Most spoof detection efforts have focused on…

The development of Urdu scene text detection, recognition, and Visual Question Answering (VQA) technologies is crucial for advancing accessibility, information retrieval, and linguistic diversity in digital content, facilitating better…

The recognition of cursive script is regarded as a subtle task in optical character recognition due to its varied representation. Every cursive script has different nature and associated challenges. As Urdu is one of cursive language that…

In this work, we present AfriHuBERT, an extension of mHuBERT-147, a compact self-supervised learning (SSL) model pretrained on 147 languages. While mHuBERT-147 covered 16 African languages, we expand this to 1,226 through continued…

The proliferation of online offensive language necessitates the development of effective detection mechanisms, especially in multilingual contexts. This study addresses the challenge by developing and introducing novel datasets for…

Sign language recognition is a challenging problem where signs are identified by simultaneous local and global articulations of multiple sources, i.e. hand shape and orientation, hand movements, body posture, and facial expressions. Solving…

We introduce ArVoice, a multi-speaker Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) speech corpus with diacritized transcriptions, intended for multi-speaker speech synthesis, and can be useful for other tasks such as speech-based diacritic restoration,…

In daily communications, Arabs use local dialects which are hard to identify automatically using conventional classification methods. The dialect identification challenging task becomes more complicated when dealing with an under-resourced…

We present the first Africentric SemEval Shared task, Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval) - The dataset is available at https://github.com/afrisenti-semeval/afrisent-semeval-2023. AfriSenti-SemEval is a sentiment…

Current Machine Translation (MT) systems for Arabic often struggle to account for dialectal diversity, frequently homogenizing dialectal inputs into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and offering limited user control over the target vernacular.…

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…

Recent advances in Deep Learning and Computer Vision have been successfully leveraged to serve marginalized communities in various contexts. One such area is Sign Language - a primary means of communication for the deaf community. However,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their benefits are largely absent for Africa's 2,000 low-resource languages. This paper comparatively analyzes African language coverage across six LLMs,…