Related papers: Bootstrapping NLP tools across low-resourced Afric…

Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks make use of massively pre-trained language models, which are computationally expensive. However, access to high computational resources added to the issue of data scarcity of African languages…

With over 2,000 languages and potentially millions of speakers, Africa represents one of the richest linguistic regions in the world. Yet, this diversity is scarcely reflected in state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) systems…

Most languages, especially in Africa, have fewer or no established part-of-speech (POS) tagged corpus. However, POS tagged corpus is essential for natural language processing (NLP) to support advanced researches such as machine translation,…

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…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is becoming a dominant subset of artificial intelligence as the need to help machines understand human language looks indispensable. Several NLP applications are ubiquitous, partly due to the myriad of…

Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational…

Embedding models are crucial to modern NLP. However, the creation of the most effective models relies on carefully constructed supervised finetuning data. For high resource languages, such as English, such datasets are readily available.…

Multilingual transformer models like mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa have obtained great improvements for many NLP tasks on a variety of languages. However, recent works also showed that results from high-resource languages could not be easily…

The focus is on critical problems in NLP related to linguistic diversity and variation across the African continent, specifically with regards to African local dialects and Arabic dialects that have received little attention. We evaluated…

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…

Historically, researchers and consumers have noticed a decrease in quality when applying NLP tools to minority variants of languages (i.e. Puerto Rican Spanish or Swiss German), but studies exploring this have been limited to a select few…

If today some African languages like Swahili have enough resources to develop high-performing Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, many other languages spoken on the continent are still lacking such support. For these languages, still…

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…

The disparity in language resources poses a challenge in multilingual NLP, with high-resource languages benefiting from extensive data, while low-resource languages lack sufficient data for effective training. Our Contrastive Language…

Generating the English transliteration of a name written in a foreign script is an important and challenging step in multilingual knowledge acquisition and information extraction. Existing approaches to transliteration generation require a…

Faced with a considerable lack of resources in African languages to carry out work in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and artificial intelligence, the research teams of NTeALan association has set…

Natural Language Interfaces and tools such as spellcheckers and Web search in one's own language are known to be useful in ICT-mediated communication. Most languages in Southern Africa are under-resourced, however. Therefore, it would be…

This paper explores the use of latent bootstrapping, an alternative self-supervision technique, for pretraining language models. Unlike the typical practice of using self-supervision on discrete subwords, latent bootstrapping leverages…

Several widely used software applications involve some form of processing of natural language, with tasks ranging from digitising hardcopies and text processing to speech generation. Varied language resources are used to develop software…

It is very costly to build up lexical resources and domain ontologies. Especially when confronted with a new application domain lexical gaps and a poor coverage of domain concepts are a problem for the successful exploitation of natural…