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Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (mRAG) systems enable language models to answer knowledge-intensive queries with citation-supported responses across languages. While such systems have been proposed, an open questions is whether…

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,…

Code-mixing is a phenomenon of mixing words and phrases from two or more languages in a single utterance of speech and text. Due to the high linguistic diversity, code-mixing presents several challenges in evaluating standard natural…

The rapid evolution of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has favoured major languages such as English, leaving a significant gap for many others due to limited resources. This is especially evident in the context of data annotation, a task…

Over the years, there have been campaigns to include the African languages in the growing research on machine translation (MT) in particular, and natural language processing (NLP) in general. Africa has the highest language diversity, with…

This paper investigates part-of-speech tagging, an important task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Nagamese language. The Nagamese language, a.k.a. Naga Pidgin, is an Assamese-lexified Creole language developed primarily as a…

Language is an essential factor of emancipation. Unfortunately, most of the more than 2,000 African languages are low-resourced. The community has recently used machine translation to revive and strengthen several African languages.…

Africa's rich linguistic heritage remains underrepresented in NLP, largely due to historical policies that favor foreign languages and create significant data inequities. In this paper, we integrate theoretical insights on Africa's language…

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on data contributed by low-resource language communities, yet the linguistic knowledge encoded in these models remains accessible only through commercial APIs. This paper investigates whether…

The proliferation of online offensive language necessitates the development of effective detection mechanisms, especially in multilingual contexts. This study addresses the challenge by developing and introducing novel datasets for…

Africa is home to over 2,000 languages from more than six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. These include 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research…

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has significantly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), which involves identifying entities like…

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…

The prevalence of social media presents a growing opportunity to collect and analyse examples of English varieties. Whilst usage of these varieties was - and, in many cases, still is - used only in spoken contexts or hard-to-access private…

To date, there exist almost no culturally-specific evaluation benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) that cover a large number of languages and cultures. In this paper, we present Global PIQA, a participatory commonsense reasoning…

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…

Nigerians have a notable online presence and actively discuss political and topical matters. This was particularly evident throughout the 2023 general election, where Twitter was used for campaigning, fact-checking and verification, and…

Though dialectal language is increasingly abundant on social media, few resources exist for developing NLP tools to handle such language. We conduct a case study of dialectal language in online conversational text by investigating…

Hausa Natural Language Processing (NLP) has gained increasing attention in recent years, yet remains understudied as a low-resource language despite having over 120 million first-language (L1) and 80 million second-language (L2) speakers…

To foster the development of new models for collaborative AI-assisted report generation, we introduce MegaWika, consisting of 13 million Wikipedia articles in 50 diverse languages, along with their 71 million referenced source materials. We…