Related papers: Correcting FLORES Evaluation Dataset for Four Afri…

Safety alignment in large language models relies predominantly on English-language training data. When harmful intent is expressed in low-resource languages, refusal mechanisms that hold in English frequently fail to activate. We introduce…

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…

Recent research in natural language processing (NLP) has achieved impressive performance in tasks such as machine translation (MT), news classification, and question-answering in high-resource languages. However, the performance of MT…

Advances in speech and language technologies enable tools such as voice-search, text-to-speech, speech recognition and machine translation. These are however only available for high resource languages like English, French or Chinese.…

Large language models (LLMs) have increased interest in vision language models (VLMs), which process image-text pairs as input. Studies investigating the visual understanding ability of VLMs have been proposed, but such studies are still…

Exploring and quantifying semantic relatedness is central to representing language and holds significant implications across various NLP tasks. While earlier NLP research primarily focused on semantic similarity, often within the English…

Evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) on knowledge-intensive tasks and factual accuracy often focus on high-resource languages primarily because datasets for low-resource languages (LRLs) are scarce. In this paper, we present Uhura --…

A broad goal in natural language processing (NLP) is to develop a system that has the capacity to process any natural language. Most systems, however, are developed using data from just one language such as English. The SIGMORPHON 2020…

Africa has over 2000 languages. Despite this, African languages account for a small portion of available resources and publications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is due to multiple factors, including: a lack of focus from…

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,…

Parallel datasets are vital for performing and evaluating any kind of multilingual task. However, in the cases where one of the considered language pairs is a low-resource language, the existing top-down parallel data such as corpora are…

Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are largely restricted to high- or mid-resource languages, and often evaluate performance on higher-order tasks in reasoning and generation. However, plenty of evidence points to the fact…

Despite the growing advancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models, the development of robust models for underrepresented languages, such as Nepali, remains a challenge. This research focuses on making an exhaustive and…

We present the findings of our participation in the SemEval-2023 Task 10: Explainable Detection of Online Sexism (EDOS) task, a shared task on offensive language (sexism) detection on English Gab and Reddit dataset. We investigated 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…

Existing data-to-text generation datasets are mostly limited to English. To address this lack of data, we create Table-to-Text in African languages (TaTa), the first large multilingual table-to-text dataset with a focus on African…

Recent advances in Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced cross-lingual conversational capabilities, yet modeling culturally nuanced and context-dependent communication remains a critical bottleneck.…

Creating speech datasets, models, and evaluation frameworks for low-resource languages remains challenging given the lack of a broad base of pertinent experience to draw from. This paper reports on the field collection of 612 hours of…

This paper describes our submission to the constrained track of WMT21 shared news translation task. We focus on the three relatively low resource language pairs Bengali to and from Hindi, English to and from Hausa, and Xhosa to and from…

The Nepali language has distinct linguistic features, especially its complex script (Devanagari script), morphology, and various dialects,which pose a unique challenge for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. While the Nepali…