Related papers: AfroDigits: A Community-Driven Spoken Digit Datase…

The development of robust, multilingual speaker recognition systems is hindered by a lack of large-scale, publicly available and multilingual datasets, particularly for the read-speech style crucial for applications like anti-spoofing. To…

Recent audio language models can follow long conversations. However, research on emotion-aware or spoken dialogue summarization is constrained by the lack of data that links speech, summaries, and paralinguistic cues. We introduce Spoken…

In recent years, multilingual pre-trained language models have gained prominence due to their remarkable performance on numerous downstream Natural Language Processing tasks (NLP). However, pre-training these large multilingual language…

We present Afro-MNIST, a set of synthetic MNIST-style datasets for four orthographies used in Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo languages: Ge`ez (Ethiopic), Vai, Osmanya, and N'Ko. These datasets serve as "drop-in" replacements for MNIST. We…

This paper introduces a new dataset, Libri-Adapt, to support unsupervised domain adaptation research on speech recognition models. Built on top of the LibriSpeech corpus, Libri-Adapt contains English speech recorded on mobile and…

Through this paper, we seek to reduce the communication barrier between the hearing-impaired community and the larger society who are usually not familiar with sign language in the sub-Saharan region of Africa with the largest occurrences…

Smartphones have been employed with biometric-based verification systems to provide security in highly sensitive applications. Audio-visual biometrics are getting popular due to their usability, and also it will be challenging to spoof…

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 advancements in spoken dialogue models, exemplified by systems like GPT-4o, have captured significant attention in the speech domain. Compared to traditional three-tier cascaded spoken dialogue models that comprise speech recognition…

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,…

Recent large language models (LLMs) show strong speech recognition and translation capabilities for high-resource languages. However, African languages remain dramatically underrepresented in benchmarks, limiting their practical use in…

This paper describes foundational efforts with SautiDB-Naija, a novel corpus of non-native (L2) Nigerian English speech. We describe how the corpus was created and curated as well as preliminary experiments with accent classification and…

Language models built from various sources are the foundation of today's NLP progress. However, for many low-resource languages, the diversity of domains is often limited, more biased to a religious domain, which impacts their performance…

During the past decade, several areas of speech and language understanding have witnessed substantial breakthroughs from the use of data-driven models. In the area of dialogue systems, the trend is less obvious, and most practical systems…

In this paper, we introduce four comprehensive datasets for the Chuvash language, aiming to support and enhance linguistic research and technological development for this underrepresented language. These datasets include a monolingual…

In this paper, we introduce a novel Face-to-Face spoken dialogue model. It processes audio-visual speech from user input and generates audio-visual speech as the response, marking the initial step towards creating an avatar chatbot system…

Speech technology systems struggle with many downstream tasks for child speech due to small training corpora and the difficulties that child speech pose. We apply a novel dataset, SpeechMaturity, to state-of-the-art transformer models to…

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa with a population of more than 200 million people. More than 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria and it is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Despite this, natural…

The struggle of social media platforms to moderate content in a timely manner, encourages users to abuse such platforms to spread vulgar or abusive language, which, when performed repeatedly becomes cyberbullying a social problem taking…

Developing Information Retrieval (IR) tools and techniques in African languages suffers from the dual problems of a lack of algorithms and very small test data collections. This affects the creation of practical IR systems and limits the…