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Child literacy is a strong predictor of life outcomes at the subsequent stages of an individual's life. This points to a need for targeted interventions in vulnerable low and middle income populations to help bridge the gap between literacy…

An effective approach to the development of ASR systems for low-resource languages is to fine-tune an existing multilingual end-to-end model. When the original model has been trained on large quantities of data from many languages,…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often falter while processing stuttering-related disfluencies -- such as involuntary blocks and word repetitions -- yielding inaccurate transcripts. A critical barrier to progress is the scarcity…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a crucial tool for linguists aiming to perform a variety of language documentation tasks. However, modern ASR systems use data-hungry transformer architectures, rendering them generally unusable for…

Language is inherent and compulsory for human communication. Whether expressed in a written or spoken way, it ensures understanding between people of the same and different regions. With the growing awareness and effort to include more…

The lack of speech data annotated with labels required for spoken language understanding (SLU) is often a major hurdle in building end-to-end (E2E) systems that can directly process speech inputs. In contrast, large amounts of text data…

Global sustainable fund universe encompasses open-end funds and exchange-traded funds (ETF) that, by prospectus or other regulatory filings, claim to focus on Environment, Social and Governance (ESG). Challengingly, the claims can only be…

The current scientific and technological landscape is characterised by the increasing availability of data resources and processing tools and services. In this setting, metadata have emerged as a key factor facilitating management, sharing…

Bengali is spoken by over 230 million people yet remains severely under-served in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization research. In this paper, we present our system for the DL Sprint 4.0 Bengali Long-Form Speech…

South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) present a complex linguistic landscape with languages such as Zulu, Sepedi, Afrikaans, French, English, and Tshiluba (Ciluba), which creates unique challenges for AI-driven translation…

Entity Set Expansion (ESE) is a critical task aiming at expanding entities of the target semantic class described by seed entities. Most existing ESE methods are retrieval-based frameworks that need to extract contextual features of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are now capable of resolving real-world GitHub issues. However, current approaches overapproximate the code context and suffer from two compounding problems: the prohibitive cost of processing massive inputs,…

This study introduces an integrated curriculum designed to empower underrepresented students by combining environmental literacy, data literacy, and computer science. The framework promotes environmental awareness, data literacy, and civic…

This paper proposes a framework to address the issue of data scarcity in Document-Grounded Dialogue Systems(DGDS). Our model leverages high-resource languages to enhance the capability of dialogue generation in low-resource languages.…

We present an analysis of semi-supervised acoustic and language model training for English-isiZulu code-switched ASR using soap opera speech. Approximately 11 hours of untranscribed multilingual speech was transcribed automatically using…

Low-resource languages (LRLs) often lack high-quality, large-scale datasets for training effective text embedding models, hindering their application in tasks like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and semantic search. In this work, we…

The development of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for low-resource African languages remains challenging due to limited transcribed speech data. While recent advances in large multilingual models like OpenAI's Whisper offer…

We present an open-source system designed for multilingual translation and speech regeneration, addressing challenges in communication and accessibility across diverse linguistic contexts. The system integrates Whisper for speech…

End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are gaining popularity over cascaded approaches due to their simplicity and ability to avoid error propagation. However, these systems model sequence labeling as a sequence prediction…

Recent works showed that end-to-end neural approaches tend to become very popular for spoken language understanding (SLU). Through the term end-to-end, one considers the use of a single model optimized to extract semantic information…