Related papers: AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual …

Multilingual pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several downstream tasks for both high-resourced and low-resourced languages. However, there is still a large performance drop for languages unseen…

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are integral to many modern natural language processing (NLP) systems. Although multilingual models cover a wide range of languages, they often grapple with challenges like high inference costs and a lack…

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…

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…

Recent Active Learning (AL) approaches in Natural Language Processing (NLP) proposed using off-the-shelf pretrained language models (LMs). In this paper, we argue that these LMs are not adapted effectively to the downstream task during AL…

Reproducible benchmarks are crucial in driving progress of machine translation research. However, existing machine translation benchmarks have been mostly limited to high-resource or well-represented languages. Despite an increasing…

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…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly multilingual, yet open models continue to underperform relative to proprietary systems, with the gap most pronounced for African languages. Continued pre-training (CPT) offers a practical route…

Multilingual Language Models (\MLLMs) such as mBERT, XLM, XLM-R, \textit{etc.} have emerged as a viable option for bringing the power of pretraining to a large number of languages. Given their success in zero-shot transfer learning, there…

Pretrained language models (PLMs) display impressive performances and have captured the attention of the NLP community. Establishing best practices in pretraining has, therefore, become a major focus of NLP research, especially since…

We present the first self-supervised multilingual speech model trained exclusively on African speech. The model learned from nearly 60 000 hours of unlabeled speech segments in 21 languages and dialects spoken in sub-Saharan Africa. On the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in a multitude of NLP tasks. However, the efficacy of such models to languages other than English is often limited. Prior works have shown that encoder-only models such as…

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,…

Researchers working on low-resource languages face persistent challenges due to limited data availability and restricted access to computational resources. Although most large language models (LLMs) are predominantly trained in…

In this work, we present AfriNLLB, a series of lightweight models for efficient translation from and into African languages. AfriNLLB supports 15 language pairs (30 translation directions), including Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Amharic, Somali,…

There is a growing body of work in recent years to develop pre-trained language models (PLMs) for the Arabic language. This work concerns addressing two major problems in existing Arabic PLMs which constraint progress of the Arabic NLU and…

Pretrained language models (PLMs) for African languages are continually improving, but the reasons behind these advances remain unclear. This paper presents the first systematic investigation into probing PLMs for linguistic knowledge about…

Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) has become a representative foundation model in the natural language processing field. Most PLMs are trained with linguistic-agnostic pre-training tasks on the surface form of the text, such as the masked…

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has led to the proliferation of large pretrained language models. These models have been shown to yield good performance, using in-context learning, even on unseen tasks and…