Related papers: FonMTL: Towards Multitask Learning for the Fon Lan…

Dialogue generation is an important NLP task fraught with many challenges. The challenges become more daunting for low-resource African languages. To enable the creation of dialogue agents for African languages, we contribute the first…

As global demand for multilingual large language models (LLMs) grows, most LLMs still remain overly focused on English, leading to the limited access to advanced AI for non-English speakers. Current methods to enhance multilingual…

Transformer-based text to speech (TTS) model (e.g., Transformer TTS~\cite{li2019neural}, FastSpeech~\cite{ren2019fastspeech}) has shown the advantages of training and inference efficiency over RNN-based model (e.g.,…

Few-shot natural language processing (NLP) refers to NLP tasks that are accompanied with merely a handful of labeled examples. This is a real-world challenge that an AI system must learn to handle. Usually we rely on collecting more…

This paper studies a new task of federated learning (FL) for semantic parsing, where multiple clients collaboratively train one global model without sharing their semantic parsing data. By leveraging data from multiple clients, the FL…

Multitask prompted finetuning (MTF) has been shown to help large language models generalize to new tasks in a zero-shot setting, but so far explorations of MTF have focused on English data and models. We apply MTF to the pretrained…

We describe an LSTM-based model which we call Byte-to-Span (BTS) that reads text as bytes and outputs span annotations of the form [start, length, label] where start positions, lengths, and labels are separate entries in our vocabulary.…

Multi-task learning (MTL) has recently contributed to learning better representations in service of various NLP tasks. MTL aims at improving the performance of a primary task, by jointly training on a secondary task. This paper introduces…

Neural TTS has shown it can generate high quality synthesized speech. In this paper, we investigate the multi-speaker latent space to improve neural TTS for adapting the system to new speakers with only several minutes of speech or…

How can language learning systems be developed for languages that lack sufficient training resources? This challenge is increasingly faced by developers across the African continent who aim to build AI systems capable of understanding and…

This thesis argues that the currently widely used Natural Language Processing algorithms possibly have various limitations related to the properties of the texts they handle and produce. With the wide adoption of these tools in rapid…

Many sequence-to-sequence tasks in natural language processing are roughly monotonic in the alignment between source and target sequence, and previous work has facilitated or enforced learning of monotonic attention behavior via specialized…

Semantic role labeling is a crucial task in natural language processing, enabling better comprehension of natural language. However, the lack of annotated data in multiple languages has posed a challenge for researchers. To address this, a…

While neural machine translation (NMT) models provide improved translation quality in an elegant, end-to-end framework, it is less clear what they learn about language. Recent work has started evaluating the quality of vector…

Given Farsi's speaker base of over 127 million people and the growing availability of digital text, including more than 1.3 million articles on Wikipedia, it is considered a middle-resource language. However, this label quickly crumbles…

Multitask algorithms typically use task similarity information as a bias to speed up and improve the performance of learning processes. Tasks are learned jointly, sharing information across them, in order to construct models more accurate…

Recent advancements for large-scale pre-training with neural signals such as electroencephalogram (EEG) have shown promising results, significantly boosting the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and healthcare. However, these…

The recent advances in neural language models have also been successfully applied to the field of chemistry, offering generative solutions for classical problems in molecular design and synthesis planning. These new methods have the…

Low-resource African languages pose unique challenges for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including natural language generation (NLG). In this paper, we develop Cheetah, a massively multilingual NLG language model for African…

Large language models are increasingly adopted as semantic backbones for neural text-to-speech systems. However, frozen LLM representations are insufficient for modeling speaker specific acoustic and perceptual characteristics. Our…