Related papers: Preuve de concept d'un bot vocal dialoguant en wol…

Intent classification models have made a significant progress in recent years. However, previous studies primarily focus on high-resource language datasets, which results in a gap for low-resource languages and for regions with high rates…

In this paper, we propose a neural machine translation system for Wolof, a low-resource Niger-Congo language. First we gathered a parallel corpus of 70000 aligned French-Wolof sentences. Then we developped a baseline LSTM based…

In recent years, we are seeing considerable interest in conversational agents with the rise of large language models (LLMs). Although they offer considerable advantages, LLMs also present significant risks, such as hallucination, which…

This work is part of the Kallaama project, whose objective is to produce and disseminate national languages corpora for speech technologies developments, in the field of agriculture. Except for Wolof, which benefits from some language data…

We present our journey in training a speech language model for Wolof, an underrepresented language spoken in West Africa, and share key insights. We first emphasize the importance of collecting large-scale, spontaneous, high-quality…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has made great advancements in recent years with major breakthroughs that have established new benchmarks. However, these advances have mainly benefited a certain group of languages commonly…

This paper presents a spell checker and correction tool specifically designed for Wolof, an under-represented spoken language in Africa. The proposed spell checker leverages a combination of a trie data structure, dynamic programming, and…

The progress of Natural Language Processing (NLP), although fast in recent years, is not at the same pace for all languages. African languages in particular are still behind and lack automatic processing tools. Some of these tools are very…

This paper describes the results of an informal collaboration launched during the African Master of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) in June 2020. After a series of lectures and labs on speech data collection using mobile applications and on…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) meets more informal and free-form input data as voice user interfaces and conversational agents such as the voice assistants such as Alexa, Google Home, etc., gain popularity. Conversational speech is both…

Voicebots have provided a new avenue for supporting the development of language skills, particularly within the context of second language learning. Voicebots, though, have largely been geared towards native adult speakers. We sought to…

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…

The agent program, called Samu, is an experiment to build a disembodied DevRob (Developmental Robotics) chatter bot that can talk in a natural language like humans do. One of the main design feature is that Samu can be interacted with using…

Growing digital archives and improving algorithms for automatic analysis of text and speech create new research opportunities for fundamental research in phonetics. Such empirical approaches allow statistical evaluation of a much larger set…

The local languages in Senegal, like those of West African countries in general, are written based on two alphabets: supplemented Arabic alphabet (called Ajami) and Latin alphabet. Each writing has its own applications. Ajami writing is…

Speech technologies are transforming interactions across various sectors, from healthcare to call centers and robots, yet their performance on African-accented conversations remains underexplored. We introduce Afrispeech-Dialog, a benchmark…

African languages remain underrepresented in natural language processing (NLP), with most corpora limited to formal registers that fail to capture the vibrancy of everyday communication. This work addresses this gap for Shona, a Bantu…

The rapid digitalization of customer service has intensified the demand for conversational agents capable of providing accurate and natural interactions. In the Algerian context, this is complicated by the linguistic complexity of Darja, a…

We develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for stories told by Afrikaans and isiXhosa preschool children. Oral narratives provide a way to assess children's language development before they learn to read. We consider a range of…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) aims to extract the semantic information from the speech utterance of user queries. It is a core component in a task-oriented dialogue system. With the spectacular progress of deep neural network models…