Related papers: AfroLID: A Neural Language Identification Tool for…

Knowing the language of an input text/audio is a necessary first step for using almost every NLP tool such as taggers, parsers, or translation systems. Language identification is a well-studied problem, sometimes even considered solved; in…

The language identification task is a crucial fundamental step in NLP. Often it serves as a pre-processing step for widely used NLP applications such as multilingual machine translation, information retrieval, question and answering, and…

Africa is home to over 2,000 languages from more than six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. These include 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research…

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,…

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…

Large-scale multilingual evaluations, such as MEGA, often include only a handful of African languages due to the scarcity of high-quality evaluation data and the limited discoverability of existing African datasets. This lack of…

Aligning with ACL 2022 special Theme on "Language Diversity: from Low Resource to Endangered Languages", we discuss the major linguistic and sociopolitical challenges facing development of NLP technologies for African languages. Situating…

Recent advances in word embeddings and language models use large-scale, unlabelled data and self-supervised learning to boost NLP performance. Multilingual models, often trained on web-sourced data like Wikipedia, face challenges: few…

Multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) acquire valuable, generalizable linguistic information during pretraining and have advanced the state of the art on task-specific finetuning. To date, only ~31 out of ~2,000 African languages…

The increase in the use of microblogging came along with the rapid growth on short linguistic data. On the other hand deep learning is considered to be the new frontier to extract meaningful information out of large amount of raw data in an…

Text embeddings are an essential building component of several NLP tasks such as retrieval-augmented generation which is crucial for preventing hallucinations in LLMs. Despite the recent release of massively multilingual MTEB (MMTEB),…

Pure acoustic neural models, particularly the LSTM-RNN model, have shown great potential in language identification (LID). However, the phonetic information has been largely overlooked by most of existing neural LID models, although this…

Language identification is the task of determining the languages for a given text. In many real world scenarios, text may contain more than one language, particularly in multilingual communities. Bilingual Language Identification (BLID) is…

While Self-supervised Learning (SSL) has significantly improved Spoken Language Identification (LID), existing models often struggle to consistently classify dialects and accents of the same language as a unified class. To address this…

We propose a novel model to hierarchically incorporate phoneme and phonotactic information for language identification (LID) without requiring phoneme annotations for training. In this model, named PHO-LID, a self-supervised phoneme…

This memo describes NTR/TSU winning submission for Low Resource ASR challenge at Dialog2021 conference, language identification track. Spoken Language Identification (LID) is an important step in a multilingual Automated Speech Recognition…

As our understanding of autism and ableism continues to increase, so does our understanding of ableist language towards autistic people. Such language poses a significant challenge in NLP research due to its subtle and context-dependent…

The paper presents a hierarchical naive Bayesian and lexicon based classifier for short text language identification (LID) useful for under resourced languages. The algorithm is evaluated on short pieces of text for the 11 official South…

Language identification (LID) is a critical step in curating multilingual LLM pretraining corpora from web crawls. While many studies on LID model training focus on collecting diverse training data to improve performance, low-resource…

Advances in speech and language technologies enable tools such as voice-search, text-to-speech, speech recognition and machine translation. These are however only available for high resource languages like English, French or Chinese.…